Resilient service of shipping alliance under disruption risk

The shipping industry has increasingly faced transportation disruptions due to geopolitical tensions and regional shocks. In response, ocean shipping (OS) carriers have adopted resilience enhancement strategies to maintain service availability and operational continuity. While such strategies ensure carriers’ ability to sustain service provision during disruptions, they may also alter competitive dynamics within shipping alliances and weaken incentives for cooperation. This study develops an incentive-based model with two asymmetric OS carriers to examine the interplay among resilience enhancement, disruption risk, logistics service competition, and shipping alliance. We find that an inferior OS carrier’s resilience enhancement strategy may benefit (or surprisingly harm) itself when the shipping alliance’s dominant carrier cannot (can) effectively enhance the alliance service level to expand the market. Even though the inferior OS carrier’s resilience enhancement strategy may increase its own profitability, we reveal that the dominant carrier’s profitability can be impaired, hampering its incentive for alliance-based cooperation. Our work elucidates the role of resilient shipping service under an uncertain and co-opetitive environment.