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A Critical Review of Port Pricing Literature :What Role for Academic Research?be more efficient and would spread the burden of repaying the costs ofmaintenance works on a more equitable basis. The proposed alternatives 55)advocate a taxation fee based on the maximum draft of each ship using theport, the number of days that ship stays in port, and the total volume of cargoloaded or unloaded at the port.IV. Conclusions and RecommendationsThis manuscript has reviewed the existing literature on port pricing with aparticular focus on the academic publications of the last decade. The reviewincludes over 60 papers and books and subdivided the research field in fivemain research areas :● Strategic pricing● Pricing and infrastructure cost recovery● Pricing and market conditions● Pricing and external costs● Empirical researchWhile port pricing has been one of the most prolific research fields inmaritime economics, also with considerable policy and industry impacts, thedebate is still open on multiple issues.As far as strategic pricing is concerned, very limited attention has beenpaid to the development of analytical models that can capture the saliencyof the application of price discrimination in the port sector. Considering thatvarious forms of price discrimination are in use in the port sector, it would bebeneficial to have further research developed in this area. A possible area forinvestigation is provided by all-inclusive charging practices, e.g. a single tarifffor a package of port services.Pricing and infrastructure cost recovery is certainly one of the mostresearched areas within the field. Although several contributions haveinvestigated the theoretical options available for port authorities and portmanagers mostly in terms of marginal cost pricing and two-part tariffs, limitedattention has been dedicated to the practical applicability of such techniques.55) Kumar(2002), p. 149. ; McIntosh and Randall K. Skalberg(2010), p. 263.220
A Critical Review of Port Pricing Literature :What Role for Academic Research?The development of sound methods for the estimation of costs, including theappropriateness of using historic or present value of assets, or the assumedvalue of land, have attracted little attention from the academic circles. 56)Furthermore the interaction between various types of charges within the sameports in terms of impacts for cost recovery practices has appeared only to themargin of most of the literature.The investigation of port competition has attracted the attention of manyacademics mostly through the use of game theory. The pricing impact ofdifferent market structure models is often reported as one of the outputs ofanalytical formalizations used to describe the strategic interactions amongports. One of the main difficulties with such models is that they tend to beremoved from practice, as they are highly stylized representations of reality.Major efforts should be made to ensure that this prolific area of research issupported empirically so to ensure that the hypotheses developed in the theoryreflect the reality of port management and operations.The limited amount of empirical research in the area of port pricing hasbeen highlighted before and with the exception of a few new contributions,not much exists in the literature. The paucity of empirical studies is probablydue to the difficulty in accessing reliable port data and the confidentialitythat typically characterizes pricing and cost information. There are herenonetheless very valuable research opportunities that could contributebridging the widening gap between practice and academia. It is the positiontaken by this paper that valuable findings in port economics can arise bystudying those research areas in between theory and practice, as it has beenthe case for many research contributions in the past.The field of port pricing has also expanded in an area that has increased inimportance for ports in recent years, namely the role of ports in controllingthe negative external impacts of port activities. There is an emerging literatureon green ports and the existing theories and pricing methods can valuablycontribute to the current policy debate on how ports should act to reduce thenegative external impacts deriving from port activities and shipping activitieswithin ports. Such models could also explore how could ports stimulatethe adoption of green practices by port users and what form of commercialadvantages could they obtain from such practices.The last fifteen years have witnessed a substantial increase of academic56) Heaver(2006), p. 11.221
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