Ship Investment Decision Making

This book focuses on ship investment decision in the shipping industry. It addresses three specific research questions: 1) How does the ship investment cost, as represented by ship price, relate to the freight rate in the shipping market? What is the influence of the famous cyclic nature of freight rate on the ship price? 2) What is the minimal market freight for ship investment if a shipping company has an option to delay? 3) In a competitive market, how does the optimal capacity expansion decision of individual shipping company affect the overall market capacity in the shipping industry? This book firstly suggests a way to anticipate the movement of ship price through modelling the ship price-freight rate relationship taking into account structural change, both theoretically and empirically. Secondly, it fills in the gap by theoretically analyzing the ship investment decision using Real Option approach, and contributes on the investment decision theory for projects with huge capital cost, long lifespan, and cyclic future market condition. Thirdly, it analyzes strategic capacity expansion in shipping and its impact on market oversupply.