Outsourcing ship management: Implications for the logistics chain

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to a better understanding of the probability that shipping companies outsource the management of vessels to ship management companies, a decision with many implications for the logistics chain. Data on 39,925 vessels are used to investigate to the extent to which 4,049 different ship-owners (each operating a fleet of at least two vessels) outsource to ship-management service providers. We rely on multinomial Logit random and fixed effects regressions to explain how the characteristics of the owners and vessels influence this decision. We find that the size of the firm in terms of the number of vessels and the number of different types of vessels influence the likelihood of outsourcing. Also, ship-owners frequently implement a mixed strategy and outsource only some of their vessels.