A Strategic Freight Market Model for Liner Shipping: Pricing, Entry, and Endogenous Service Choice

National freight transport models usually treat prices and service provision as exogenous. This paper models both as outcomes of strategic interaction among operators of scheduled, loop-based freight services. It compares oligopolistic competition, monopoly, Ramsey pricing with service-level or system-wide cost recovery, and welfare-maximising planning. Shippers across multiple segments choose between direct cyclic liner services and an outside option, using logit demand. Operators select from candidate port rotations, vessel classes and speeds, and set origin-destination prices subject to leg capacities. Under competition, each operator offers one service. Equilibrium requires that no operator can profitably enter, exit or replace its service after prices re-equilibrate. The solution method computes global pricing best responses and tests all unilateral service deviations, pruning only those excluded by an analytical profit bound. All regimes use the same demand and cost structure. In a synthetic Baltic-North Sea application, multinomial logit competition sustains more overlapping services and lower prices than monopoly. System-wide Ramsey pricing captures most of the planner's welfare gain without a deficit. Fuel-price and demand shocks affect competitive prices through changes in the service set. When maritime services are close substitutes, entrants avoid overlapping markets and competition can reproduce monopoly outcomes. The results illustrate mechanisms rather than forecast actual markets, showing how market organisation shapes service provision, prices, modal shares and welfare.