Has Container Shipping Industry been Fixing Prices in Collusion?: A Korean Market Case

Abstract

Purpose - The purpose of this study is to analyze the market power of the Korea Container Shipping Market (Intra Asia, Korea-Europe, and Korea-U.S.) to verify the existence of collusion empirically, and to answer whether the joint actions of liner market participants in Korea have formed market dominance for each route. Precisely, it will be verified through the Lerner index as to whether the regional market of Asia is a monopoly, oligopoly, or perfect competition. Design/methodology - This study used a Lerner index adjusted with elasticity presented in the New Imperial Organization (NEIO) studies. NEIO refers to a series of empirical studies that estimate parameters to judge market power from industrial data. This study uses B-L empirical models by Bresnahan (1982) and Lau (1982). In addition, NEIO research data statistically contain self-regression and stability problems as price and time series data. A dynamic model following Steen and Salvanes' Error Correction Model was used to solve this problem. Findings - The empirical results are as follows. First, λ, representing market power, is nearly zero in all three markets. Second, the Korean shipping market shows low demand elasticity on average. Nevertheless, the markup is low, a characteristic that is difficult to see in other industries. Third, the Korean shipping market generally remains close to perfect competition from 2014 to 2022, but extreme market power appears in a specific period, such as COVID-19. Fourth, there was no market power in the Intra Asia market from 2008 to 2014. Originality/value - Doubts about perfect competition in the liner market continued, but there were few empirical cases. This paper confirmed that the Korea liner market is a perfect competition market. This paper is the first to implement dynamics using ECM and recursive regression to demonstrate market power in the Korean liner market by dividing the shipping market into Deep Sea and Intra Asia separately. It is also the first to prove the most controversial problems in the current shipping industry numerically and academically.