Bidding Competition Between Carriers in Maritime Tenders

This paper focuses on bidding competition among carriers in the ocean container industry. Using a data set of 23,614 bids from nine carriers by a European retailer in 2017, we apply a hedonic pricing framework to identify differences in the average bids. We find that differences between carriers have little impact on the variation in bids. We further disentangle differences at the contract level using conditional fixed-effect Logit regressions. Among the various carriers, the Chinese state-owned carrier COSCO is much more likely to submit a lower bid than its competitors when there are many bidders.