Abstract
In order to survive under the ever increasing pressure to operate more efficiently, transportation companies are obliged to adopt a collaborative focus. Although organisations become increasingly aware of the inevitable character of horizontal collaboration, surveys report failure rates up to 70% for starting strategic partnerships. While a growing body of research acknowledges the importance of fit between partners for coalition sustainability, no extensive study has been performed on the numerical relationship between specific company traits and the performance of the alliances these organisations are involved in. This paper empirically investigates the impact of coalition characteristics on attainable collaborative savings in a joint route planning context. Factorial analysis of variance is applied to examine desirable coalition structures for horizontal carrier collaborations based on request sharing. Overall, our experiments suggest that carriers may reap significant operational benefits from sharing orders. However, the extent of these benefits highly depends on the characteristics of the partnering organisations, stressing the importance of careful partner selection.
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Acknowledgements
This research is supported by the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO) and the Interuniversity Attraction Poles Programme initiated by the Belgian Science Policy Office (research project COMEX, Combinatorial Optimization: Metaheuristics & Exact Methods). The computational resources and services used in this work were provided by the VSC (Flemish Supercomputer Centre), funded by the Hercules Foundation and the Flemish Government - department EWI.
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Verdonck, L., Ramaekers, K., Depaire, B. et al. Analysing the Effect of Partner Characteristics on the Performance of Horizontal Carrier Collaborations. Netw Spat Econ 19, 583–609 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11067-018-9389-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11067-018-9389-y