Pablo Coto Millán

Game theory and port economics: a survey of recent research.

The last decade has seen a significant upsurge of studies seeking to examine the impacts of port agents’ strategic decisions. The outcome has been a wide range of results and conclusions. The aim of this work is to provide a review of this recent research in the port industry that uses strategic interaction approaches from industrial organization and game theory. The paper concentrates on five topics: ownership, relationship between ports and their hinterlands, port authorities and port operators’ relations, capacity investment decisions, and port specialization. We present the objectives, methodologies and results of the papers reviewed, with special emphasis on how models are developed. The results are not always consistent between the works analyzed. On the one hand, this could be due to the complexity of the port industry and the high number of agents that intervene. Researchers need to simplify reality to build their models by imposing restrictive assumptions. On the other hand, results could be very sensitive to the techniques used or to the differences on the port environment of the countries of study. However, some conclusions can be extracted and they present a good starting point to develop more sophisticated models. Finally, we also propose avenues for future research.

Estimando la conducta de la industria del transporte aéreo en España

El objetivo de este estudio es analizar la industria del transporte aereo en Espana. Este trabajo se ha centrado en el segmento de negocio y presentamos un modelo teorico de competencia oligopolistica que puede ser empiricamente probado a traves de tres ecuaciones: de demanda, de cuota de mercado y de precio. Contribuimos a desarrollar la creatividad y la innovacion con la elaboracion de una muestra que estudia 113 rutas durante 96 quincenas (2011-2015), donde se analiza como reaccionan los clientes tanto a los cambios estrategicos realizados por las lineas aereas (frecuencias, capacidad, precios) como a cambios socio-economicos. El analisis se realiza aplicando la tecnica econometrica de las variables instrumentales y los resultados muestran que la competencia en este mercado se produce a la Cournot.