LAUSR

Abstract Environmental sustainability plays an increasingly significant role in today’s maritime industry. Green strategies such as speed reduction, fuel switching, alternative fuels can effectively decrease the harmful emissions from ships and increase environmental sustainability. In the field of green shipping, existing papers focus on using optimization models to calculate the optimal values of green efforts during shipping process. In contrary, this paper adopts a new and alternative perspective by explore the evolutionarily stable strategy for the shipping lines in the green concerning maritime market. First, the pricing decision is formulated as a model by considering the price elasticity, market competition, green investment and the level of green concerning in the market. Then, an evolutionary game theory framework embedded the pricing model is proposed to study the long-term green strategic behavior of maritime shipping lines. In the proposed game framework, each shipping line can choose to adopt a green strategy which is able to reduce the emission during shipping process or a non-green strategy which is cost-effective. A replicator dynamic system is used to examine the evolutionarily stable strategy that will eventually be chosen by the majority of the shipping lines. To illustrate the results, we conduct a simulation experiment and sensitivity analysis. The results demonstrate that the green-concerned shipping lines can gain higher payoff compared to the shipping lines whose goal are payoff maximization under green concerned market. The findings in this paper can provide guidance to maritime shipping lines in formulating their green strategies.