Effect of transportation cost on logistic transaction efficiency and outsourcing - with Qinghai-Tibet railway as an example

Transportation is a fundamental, if not crucial, part of logistic value chain for logistic industry or enterprise. Transportation cost can affect not only logistic transaction efficiency, but also diversified logistic organization forms - self-supply, alliance or outsourcing. With the increase volume of goods and passengers transported, network economy can be significantly achieved. Under such a circumstance, logistic transaction efficiency, that is, ratio of transaction cost to the price of transaction target, becomes better off, level of social economic division deepens, and sophisticated logistic organization forms come into being, of which, outsourcing is one of the popular transaction structure. With transportation cost at the core, the paper puts forward a quantitative model and makes positive study on the effect of Qinghai-Tibet railway on logistic transaction efficiency for the first time. The results manifest that logistic transaction efficiency has been greatly improved since after the operation from July, 2006.