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Demand and Supply Modeling of Crowd-shipping Markets

<p>The rise of technologies and the Internet have provided
opportunities to connect logistics demand and supply using the crowd. In this
system, named crowd-shipping (CS), a requester doing the shipping selects a courier
via a platform. In reality, the idea of CS has been explored by many firms over
the last several years. However, there is a lack of fundamental understanding
of the issues related to: (1) the markets that are likely to be influenced by CS;
(2) the considerations that govern the success of this system; and the (3) the
impacts of CS and its design.</p><p><br></p>

<p>To address these issues, there is a need of understanding CS
system's stakeholders, such as requesters' (i.e. senders') and potential couriers'
(i.e. driver-partners') behaviors as well as operations and management of CS
firms. This research will address these gaps by conducting a survey to
understand driver-partners' behaviors and requesters' behaviors given the CS
services availability in the logistics market. Then, pricing and compensation
strategies are designed and modeled based on behavior rules of supply and demand
generations as well as various CS market penetrations. As such, this research
addresses the CS industry in a triad of supply, demand, and operations and
management.</p><p><br></p>

<p>This research uses advanced econometrics, statistics
analysis, mixed integer optimization, and data science techniques to analyze
data and generate insights. The contributions of this research are to identify
the contributing factors that impact the emerging logistics service. This
research also reveals factors that influence the current and future shipping
behaviors of requesters, as well as influencing factors of the individuals'
willingness to work as driver-partners. The integrated matching and routing
models have been developed to examine different pricing and compensation
strategies under several market penetration scenarios. `Individual' price and
compensation have found to provide the highest profit for CS platform
providers.</p><p><br></p>

<p>This research provides meaningful knowledge for
stakeholders, especially for the CS firms to develop business strategies.
Several remarkable benefits that CS firms can obtain include: focusing on some
specific population groups to recruit driver-partners (e.g. people with children,
middle-aged people having lower incomes, or no car ownership); addressing
certain market segments to promote CS services (e.g. tight-window delivery
packages, peripheral products, or personal health and medicine items);
implementing `individual' or `flatted' pricing and compensation strategies
depending on the time of the day, the day of the week, or the market
penetration; and improving platform features to incorporate requesters' and driver-partners'
expectations.</p>

  1. 10.25394/pgs.8044811.v1
Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:purdue.edu/oai:figshare.com:article/8044811
Date14 May 2019
CreatorsTho Van Le (5929928)
Source SetsPurdue University
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeText, Thesis
RightsCC BY 4.0
Relationhttps://figshare.com/articles/Demand_and_Supply_Modeling_of_Crowd-shipping_Markets/8044811

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