Identifying Efficient Ports Under Competition : An Application of Information Based Duration Analysis

Motivated by the recent events and developments in the transshipment industry, this paper studies the applications of information discrepancy measures such as Kullbak-Leilber functions in identifying the ports where container ships could expect to receive efficient and speedy service when little information or a very limited amount of observation is available about the ports and berth periods of previous ships. This paper relies on the search model methodologies developed for duration variables and simulates scenarios under different distributional and structural assumptions, investigating how difference in administration, management, and capacity could lead to the identification of a given port as an efficient one by a liner