In reality, strictly speaking, there is neither a completely competitive transportation market nor a completely monopolized transportation market. However, in some areas or routes where road transportation is particularly active and developed, it can be considered as a market close to complete competition, while in some remote areas, there is often only one mode of transportation, such as railway, highway, water transport or air transport, and the traffic volume is not large. There are only one or several enterprises that provide transportation products, and one of them has an absolute advantage in market share, which can be considered as close to a complete monopoly market. If subdivided by region or route, the current transportation market structure in China is dominated by monopoly and oligopoly. Because transportation activities take place in a specific time and space and under different conditions of vehicles, and the differences of these conditions are all factors that lead to different quality of transportation products. Therefore, the quality of transportation products is often different. Economic theory tells us that the competitive market is more effective, therefore, it should be ideal to form a monopolistic competitive transportation market, which is one of our goals in developing the transportation market.
Transport enterprises must consider the market structure when determining the freight rate. In any case, one of the basic conditions that it must meet to determine the freight rate is to ensure that its marginal revenue is equal to the marginal cost. In a perfectly competitive market, its freight rate must be the same as that of other enterprises; In a completely monopolized market, the supply of transportation enterprises often becomes an important factor affecting freight rates. Although its behavior can affect the market price, it is not that the higher the freight, the better. In this regard, we will do some mathematical analysis below. We investigate on the basis of monopolistic competition and price from the perspective of transportation enterprises themselves. It will determine the output (transportation volume or turnover) at the point where the marginal revenue equals the marginal cost, and the corresponding price on the demand curve is the freight rate when the profit of the transportation enterprise is maximized. For oligopoly market, the behavior of oligopoly transportation enterprises is interdependent. When the market demand curve is fixed and the freight rate is fixed, the decrease of the market share of one transportation enterprise means the increase of the share of other transportation enterprises. An increase in the market share of one transport enterprise means a decrease in the share of several other transport enterprises.
Third, the characteristics of the transportation market (master)
The transportation market, like other markets, is a form of economic contact with commodity exchange as the main content. It is the bridge and link between transport producers and consumers, so it has the characteristics and attributes of general commodity market. In addition, due to the characteristics of the transportation industry itself, the transportation market has some characteristics different from other markets.
1. The transportation market has strong space and timeliness.
(1) The demand of transportation market (transportation demand) shows strong spaciousness and timeliness.
The first is the spatial characteristics of the transportation market.
The second is the time characteristics of the transportation market.
(2) Derivation of traffic demand
Transportation demand is the need that people and goods can pay in terms of spatial displacement.
Derivation is an important feature of traffic demand. In most cases, the spatial displacement of people and objects is not an end but a means, which is an intermediate process that must be completed in order to achieve some other purpose in production or life.
Social production and people's lifestyle have derived the characteristics of traffic demand in time and space.