Abstract

The growth of electronic commerce generates significant demand for the delivery of personal goods. Crowdsourcing applications have the potential to create more flexible alternatives to existing package-delivery services. However, the success of these applications is strongly related to the strategies of the crowd couriers, which are not well-understood in the current literature. In this paper, we analyzed data from a real-world crowdsourcing application that uses an auction-based mobile app to deliver small packages in urban, suburban, and intra-metropolitan areas. Our analysis reveals the spatial strategies of crowdsourced couriers, which are correlated with delivery pricing and the courier's experience. The couriers with strong relationships with specific customers create ongoing trust relations, which makes deliveries over medium distance routes financially reasonable for those couriers. We discuss how our findings can help to maximize package-delivery markets and crowdsourcing markets in general by supporting the couriers' strategies.

摘要

电子商务的发展对个人物品的交付产生了巨大的需求。众包应用程序有可能为现有的包裹递送服务创建更灵活的替代方案。然而，这些应用程序的成功与人群快递员的策略密切相关，这在当前的文献中并没有得到很好的理解。在本文中，我们分析了来自真实世界众包应用程序的数据，该应用程序使用基于拍卖的移动应用程序在城市、郊区和大都市地区提供小包裹。我们的分析揭示了众包快递员的空间策略，这些策略与送货定价和快递员的经验相关。与特定客户关系密切的快递员会建立持续的信任关系，这使得中距离路线的交付对于这些快递员来说在经济上是合理的。我们讨论了我们的研究结果如何通过支持快递员的策略来帮助最大化包裹递送市场和众包市场。