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The purpose of this paper is to investigate and clarify “irrationality” problem through the maritime industry practices and leading incentives behind common investors.

This paper includes a review of broader business and economics literature; review of shipping business practices and detection of institutional pathways and misleading mechanisms behind the irrational preferences; investigation of data (for some arguments); and introduction of a theoretical approach.

There are several industry practices and norms well established and followed by decision makers, which may cause and initiate illogical and irrational (long-run) preferences. Short-termism is an erroneous habit of common shipping investors, which is embedded and forced through traditional financial math (i.e. discounted cash flow), financial system (e.g. initial public offerings with high-frequency transactions, interest rate governance and asset valuation mechanism) or flawed contracting tradition (i.e. commission bias).

Both shipping business and financial institutions need to redesign their working mechanisms, evaluation systems, risk detection and assessment procedures. As discussed in Section 4.7, commission-based (float) services must be converted to regular flat rate payments with long-term contracts to protect investors from rational choices of intermediaries in the short-run which encourages investor’s irrationality. Having a long-term service contract will also improve sustainability of intermediaries and lower their business risk (win-win).

The impact of this paper is two-fold. First, it raises critical questions about professional decay and drawbacks of some traditional instruments in the shipping business. For the first time, this paper emphasises on various challenges which deteriorate credibility of the industry and causes ill-defined investments. Some arguments have extreme priority for strengthening the foundations of the industry. Second, this paper establishes a new stream of scholarly research highlighting weaknesses of conventional economic approach and demand for outsourcing other schools of economics (e.g. institutional and behavioural) into the shipping business.

In the last four years, since Volume I of this Bibliography first appeared, there has been an explosion of literature in all the main functional areas of business. This wealth of material poses problems for the researcher in management studies — and, of course, for the librarian: uncovering what has been written in any one area is not an easy task. This volume aims to help the librarian and the researcher overcome some of the immediate problems of identification of material. It is an annotated bibliography of management, drawing on the wide variety of literature produced by MCB University Press. Over the last four years, MCB University Press has produced an extensive range of books and serial publications covering most of the established and many of the developing areas of management. This volume, in conjunction with Volume I, provides a guide to all the material published so far.

The purpose of this paper is to provide implications for forecasting export of Korean shipbuilding industry that is suffering from deadlock in newbuilding orders, by investigating the causal relationship between freight rate earnings and newbuilding orders in the shipbuilding market.

Using a sample of freight rate earnings and newbuilding orders (in various terms) over the period 1996-2016, Granger causality between the two variables are examined in a vector autoregressive (VAR) model. In addition, the potential asymmetry of the causal relationship according to bullish and bearish market conditions is also investigated using a combination of moving averages of different time spans.

The results indicate a uni-directional causality running from freight rate earnings to newbuilding orders. This finding implies that shipowners’ confidence in the shipping freight market is particularly important determinants in their newbuilding investment, which is consistent with the overconfidence hypothesis. However, the causality does not vary according to different market conditions.

This study offers several importation contributions. First, the authors provide evidence that newbuilding orders are positively associated with increase in freight rate earnings. Second, the authors document a causality running from changes in freight rate earnings to the volume of newbuilding orders. These findings support the theoretical expectation of the overconfidence hypothesis. Third, contrary to the findings in the financial market, there is no asymmetric response of the volume of newbuilding orders in bullish and bearish markets. Fourth, this study provide implications for management of Korean shipyards by providing evidence on driving force of newbuilding investment decisions of their customers (shipowners).

The findings in this study suggest implications for management of Korean shipyards by providing evidence on driving force of newbuilding investment decisions of their customers, as well as determinants of shipbuilding export, an important source of Korea’ national income.

The analysing the major determinants of shipbuilding exports, the findings in this study presents understanding of market cycles in shipbuilding, an important source of Korea’s national income and balance of payment.

This study is the first attempt to analyse the relationship between freight rate earnings and newbuilding investment in the context of the behavioural theory in economics.

Sailing toward sustainability is becoming the strategic focus of shipping firms. Drawing on organizational information processing theory (OIPT) and the theory of planned behavior (TPB), we investigated the impact of digital transformation (DT) on shipping firms’ sustainable management performance and the boundary conditions guiding this relationship.

The authors examined the hypotheses by employing hierarchical linear modeling on two-wave time-lagged data from 189 shipping firm employees in China.

The results suggest that a shipping firm’s DT is positively associated with its sustainable management performance and that the relationship is strengthened by having better cross-functional and customer coordination mechanisms. Furthermore, our three-way interaction analyses show that while injunctive norms in a shipping firm’s networks can strengthen the contingency roles of both cross-functional and customer coordination mechanisms, descriptive norms alone significantly influence customer coordination.

Drawing on organizational information processing and planned behavior theories, the present research provides new insights into leveraging DT for sailing toward sustainable success. Moreover, this study extends the current understandings of the boundary conditions of the relationship between DT and sustainable management performance by showing the two-way and three-way interaction effects of coordination mechanisms and subjective norms. The findings of the present research can be utilized as effective strategies for promoting sustainable management performance.

In the shipping industry, both sales and purchases of second-hand ships and freight transport services are prevalently tailormade and traded with intense bilateral negotiations. Price bargaining is the key step of this negotiation process and plays a crucial role in determining mutually agreed prices. Despite its cruciality and applicability, the price bargaining has yet received due conceptual and/or theoretical attention in the shipping literature. This paper attempts to conceptually examine the role of bargaining in shipping transaction prices and subsequently puts forward directions for future research. In doing so, the paper focuses on two types of transactions taking place in shipping markets: asset market trading of second-hand vessels and service market trading shipping freights.

The paper begins with a systematic literature review of price bargaining in the field of economics and management disciplines from a game-theoretic perspective. This approach does logically lead to the establishment of a conceptual framework for price bargaining in shipping sub-markets as a step toward having taken into consideration a variety of heterogeneities commonly present in trading activities and market dynamics.

A set of research areas has been consequently identified where price bargaining and mechanisms for the shipping freight and asset markets could be further explored and analyzed in a way to make better pricing decisions under a more tangible framework.

One of the critical challenges when using bargaining mechanisms to make a decision on pricing shipping services and assets is how to operationalize the study for empirical investigation as some of the factors are internal information of the players and are not adequately revealed to externals: that is, an imperfect information sharing case. The current study aims, however, not to conduct an empirical analysis but to initiate a conversation among maritime economists by bringing their attention to this not-yet fully explored and potentially impactful field of research and by asking them to treat bargaining from a perspective for pricing shipping assets and services. It is claimed that, by doing so, one could better understand price differences between individual contracts.

This study would be considered the first of its kind to provide a detailed survey of the bargaining theory and models from a game theoretical perspective as a theoretical lens to understand its importance and relevance in pricing shipping assets and services. It also provides a simplified operational case on utilizing bargaining in practically pricing freight services.

The authors employ the vessels that comprise the dry bulk segment of the maritime industry and examine how market sentiment affects the herding behavior of shipping investors in a real asset market.

The authors employ a threshold regression model to examine how changes in market sentiment can affect herding behavior in oceanic dry bulk shipping.

The results show that the behavioral aspect of investing, measured through intentional and unintentional herding, contrary to the results for financial markets, is affected by sentiment on the buy side (newbuildings) but not on the sell side (scrapping). Furthermore, the authors provide evidence that when market sentiment is negative, investors tend to follow market leaders (intentional herding), while, when sentiment is positive, unintentional herding leads to common investment practices among shipping investors.

The results have significant implications both for academics and for practitioners since they reflect a clear distinction of the pattern of investment decisions for real assets, compared to financial assets.

This study aims to explain the facts about behavioral biases that cannot be explained by rational patterns in ship investments of small-size shipping companies.

A qualitative approach was adopted in this study. The systematic approach of Wolcott (1994) and the action flows proposed by Miles and Huberman (1994) were taken into consideration.

Factors affecting ship investments are classified as ship finance, market timing, ship specifications and profile and business models of ship investors. In addition, behavioral biases that stand out under each theme are explained in the light of behavioral finance literature.

The originality of this study rests on the lack of studies on behavioral aspects of ship investments.

The global shipping industry has been rocked by a wave of disruptive innovation driven by a thriving ecosystem of digital technology start-ups that have emerged in the last few years and set up offices in Greece. After the appearance of COVID-19, entrepreneurial leadership has grown in importance for guiding commercial shipping through times of exceptional circumstances. The problem is that there is a lack of understanding of the experiences of Greek digital entrepreneurs launching their tech start-ups within the maritime sector – from the initial vision to a real-world innovative business disruptor. We aim to answer the questions of who the Greek digital entrepreneur in the maritime sector is and how their entrepreneurial actions contribute to a growing knowledge base of digital entrepreneurship for future theoretical research and professional practice. This single-subject, archival case study demonstrates the social and commercial value of the “who” and “how” of digital entrepreneurship in the maritime sector through the case of Harbor Lab, an Athens-based start-up that disrupted the maritime industry through innovative use of emerging technologies to calculate disbursements (port expenses) and through the establishment of a horizontal, empathetic, open workplace culture. The outcomes of this study contributed a fresh perspective of scholarly knowledge on digital entrepreneurship for future theoretical research and professional practice.

In the 1990s, following the challenges imposed by globalisation, the liner shipping industry experienced profound changes, leading major carriers to create ad-hoc logistics business-units. Nevertheless the vertical integration of shipping lines along the transport chain faced important entry barriers in various regions.This paper aims at analysing the impact of such barriers on carriers’ pathways of expansion in the logistics business. It mainly focuses on the East-Asian market, as a relevant empirical case in which important institutional and socio-political obstacles are still in force .Main results disclose sui-generis paths of expansion achieved by major carriers, in contrast with linear constructs of time and space proposed by classical TNC theories. In such respect, port operations reveal to be the most critical stage of the chain. The ‘sidestep’ of the port phase, leading to investments in other on-shore activities (warehousing, inland terminals, etc.) as well as the implementation of aggressive financial campaigns (acquisitions and takeovers), reveal the unfaltering will of top shipping lines: the quick achievement of a successful vertical and horizontal expansion despite environmental obstacles.