The Research Council of Norway is providing funding for a project which aims to better understand the factors that influence the shippers' decisions to ship goods by sea or by road and how they interact to produce a certain outcome.
The primary aim is to be achieved by constructing a generic model of the single shipper's choice situation, and to embed it in an equilibrium model with many shippers and with network externalities, in the sense that aggregate volumes by each mode determine the offered freight rate and the freight rates influence the decision of each single shipper.
For more details of this project, see here.