Most seaports face constraints in financial resources to some degree, and thus need to balance the investments in capacity and natural disaster prevention. On the one hand, due to budget constraint, limited resources need to be allocated between the two tasks. On the other hand, the benefit of natural disaster prevention investment is likely to be higher for ports with larger capacity. This study builds a stylized analytical model to examine the managerial and policy implications of such interactions between the two counteracting mechanisms. We find that the port managers would always prioritize capacity investment over natural disaster prevention investment. Social welfare maximizing ports invest more in both capacity and disaster prevention than those chosen by profit maximizing operators. However, compared with profit maximizing ports, welfare maximizing ports also require a larger budget to justify the investment in disaster prevention. Moreover, with increasing intensity of natural disaster, a port’s capacity investment decreases and its disaster prevention investment increases, irrespective of its objective. The magnitudes of both changes are larger for welfare maximizing ports than for profit maximizing ports.

大多数海港在一定程度上面临财政资源的限制，因此需要在能力和自然灾害预防方面的投资保持平衡。一方面，由于预算限制，需要在两个任务之间分配有限的资源。另一方面，对于容量更大的港口，自然灾害预防投资的收益可能会更高。这项研究建立了一个程式化的分析模型，以检验这两种抵消机制之间这种相互作用的管理和政策含义。我们发现，港口经理将始终优先考虑产能投资而不是自然灾害预防投资。最大化社会福利港口在容量和防灾上的投入要比利润最大化运营商选择的投入更多。但是，与利润最大化的港口相比，最大限度地提高福利水平的港口还需要更大的预算才能证明在防灾方面的投资是合理的。此外，随着自然灾害的加剧，港口的能力投资减少，其防灾投资增加，而与目标无关。对于福利最大化的港口，这两个变化的幅度都大于利润最大化的港口。