Games with Connected Player Strategies for Analyzing the Competitiveness of a Railroad Company in a Cargo Transportation Marketplace

The competitiveness of a railroad company in a marketplace of cargo transportation in a region of a country is analyzed with the use of two mathematical models in the form of two-person games in which all the feasible player strategies are connected, i.e., cannot be chosen by the players independently, and the set of these connected strategies is a polyhedron described by a system of compatible linear inequalities. The first model is used to analyze the case in which the railroad company competes with all the other cargo carriers that offer their services in the region, for instance, with tracking companies, whereas the second model helps to find potential profitable coalitions of the company with some of these carriers in an attempt to enlarge the company\´s fair share of the market as much as possible on account of providing a "door-to-door" service for clients that need to move high volumes of cargo over long distances.