Efficiency of Transport Collaboration Mechanisms

Horizontal cooperation between road haulage contractors is well established in practice. However, over time many cooperations were subject to transformational processes that led their organizations to merge. Here, a concept of collaborative planning, operational transport collaboration, is discussed. This concept achieves higher degrees of organizational autonomy for the participants of cooperation. The idea behind operational transport collaboration is an exchange of transportation requests in order to create competitive advantages in terms of cost and flexibility. For this exchange, mechanisms have to be found that create the best possible allocation of transportation requests to road haulage contractors. Criteria which mechanisms have to comply with in order to create beneficial and desirable solutions for all participants despite the situation of asymmetric information and strategic behavior are derived from microeconomics and game theory. Combinatorial auctions are then discussed as one means of fulfilling these criteria.