THE HIERARCHICAL ANALYSIS OF PERCEIVED COMPETITIVENESS: An Application to Korean Container Ports.

The competitiveness of a port provides ship owners, operators and shippers with a significant basis in selecting a calling-port. Port operators can utilize the competitive advantage as a parameter for counter measures by grasping the advantages and disadvantages of the ports and be a prime factor of opportunities and threats of the ports. The determinants of port competitiveness are, however, subject to various sources, which do again depend on the elements of judged subjects, businesses, circumstances, the degree of knowledge or know-hows accumulated and the level of information exposure, and so on. Moreover, the components are mixed with quantitative and qualitative factors, and have a inter-active and complex relationship. Keeping this complicated nature of the business in mind, this paper will establish the fuzzy structuring method and apply it to the port industry so as to identify the subordinate and hierarchical relationships among the factors having an impact on port competiti