Vessel sharing and its impact on maritime operations and carbon emissions

The shipping industry touches approximately 90% of all international trade, producing roughly one billion tons of greenhouse gases each year. Changes in the operations and coordination of global‐shipping vessels can have a substantial impact on vessel's carbon emissions, but these efforts need to fulfill the service expectation of individual firms receiving consignments. We examine the associated gains (or losses) in operational efficiencies and environmental benefits (if there are any) from vessel sharing. We do so by analyzing a dataset that merges multiple years of U.S. port records and maritime emissions data. Using simultaneous regression equation models, our results indicate that the maritime emissions (attributable to receiving firms) drop by 5%, on average, for each additional carrier sharing a vessel. We confirm several operational efficiencies emerging from vessel sharing, such as increased average utilization and reductions in “route redundancy.” These operational changes mediate the total effect of vessel sharing on emissions. However, we do find that vessel sharing is associated with a slight increase in lead time, measured as the number of days it took to deliver the goods. Although our empirical setting is in the global shipping industry, asset sharing is a mechanism that can be adopted by any industry. Our findings show the importance of exploring the conditions and settings where sharing may or may not have operational and/or environmental trade‐offs.