In a platform economy, alongside the traditional reselling channel, online intermediaries (e.g., Amazon and JD.com) open their platforms to allow manufacturers to distribute products directly to consumers via an agency channel, i.e., platform openness. This paper investigates the implications of platform openness when a manufacturer possesses product quality information unknown to the online intermediary

Time dependencies of travel speeds in time-dependent vehicle routing problems (TDVRPs) are usually accounted for by discretizing the planning horizon into several time periods. However, travel speeds usually change frequently in real road networks, so many time periods are needed to evaluate candidate solutions accurately in model and solution construction for practical TDVRPs, which increases substantially

As an emerging mobility service with a wide range of benefits, flexible buses balance monetary costs, travel time, and comfort, and have evolved into a powerful supplement to traditional travel modes. This study investigates the dynamic operations of an integrated mobility service system of flexible electric buses and fixed-route transits, such as traditional buses and metros. The proposed integrated

Value-insured services are widely used to reduce senders’ perceived risk in crowdsourced delivery. However, research has not examined whether and how the value-insured strategy provided by crowdsourced delivery platforms (CDPs) affects those platforms’ decisions and the participation behaviors of two-sided users (senders and couriers). In this study, we develop game-theoretic models for a CDP’s pricing

We investigate the delivery investment decision in the context of trade credit (TC), under which the retailer applies for deferred payments from its supplier. In addition to ordering procurement, the retailer must allocate limited capital to reduce delivery time, which promotes time-sensitive demand. We develop a Stackelberg game in which the supplier determines the wholesale price and then the retailer

In the digital age, coordinating robots and humans is critical in e-commerce warehousing. Motivated by observed industrial practices, this study presents a queueing theory based analytical model to investigate the planning issue of robot-human coordination in a parts-to-picker warehousing system. The critical planning decisions involve finding the optimal number of robots in the warehouse, the expected

The e-commerce market expands rapidly, and manufacturers sell remanufactured and new products online, making e-commerce closed-loop supply chains face product differential pricing and follower firms’ unfair psychology due to the large profit gap between system members. Therefore, we price differentially by considering consumers’ preference for remanufactured and new products and develop a centralized

Drawing upon economic and environmental sustainability, this study explores how developing the operational resilience of the medical supply chain (MSC) contributes to maintaining healthcare in the face of disruption risks, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. To this end, an optimization-based roadmap is proposed by employing lean tools to achieve and realize MSC resilience. A novel two-stage stochastic

This study focuses on the post-harvest preprocessing of fruits and vegetables, aiming to provide an effective way to conduct preprocessing operations in short food supply chains. We consider both a heterogeneous fleet of mobile preprocessing units and the possibility to pick up products for centralized preprocessing. The resulting problem is a variant of the classic heterogeneous fleet vehicle routing

The evolving COVID-19 epidemic pose significant threats and challenges to emergency response operations. This paper focuses on designing an emergency logistic network, including the deployment of emergency facilities and the allocation of supplies to satisfy the time-varying demands. A Demand prediction-Network optimization-Decision adjustment framework is proposed for the emergency logistic network

The application of smart charging to battery electric buses can provide opportunities for bus operators to reduce the operational costs of their bus fleet. This research aims to create insight into the impact of different charging strategies for battery electric bus fleets on charging costs and the grid load. It proposes a novel framework to model the charging process of battery electric buses for

This paper aims to seek the innovative development strategy for a leading firm in a competitive market when considering product unreliability and risk behavior. A higher innovation level may bring about better product performance. Nevertheless, it may cause some unreliability events which might incur serious negative outcomes (e.g., products recall). Facing uncertain outcomes, the innovative firm may

This study examines two selling strategies, namely, crowdfunding and traditional selling. Under traditional selling, the production behavior of the creator occurs before the purchases by consumers. In this case, the demand is uncertain, and the creator’s production behavior is affected by the initial funding level. Under crowdfunding, the production behavior of the creator comes after the consumers

This paper proposes a ride-hailing sharing problem with parcel transportation. In the study, both passengers and parcels can be transported by ordering the requests through a ride-hailing platform, in which the passengers can only be delivered by ride-hailing vehicles (RHVs) while parcels can be delivered by both RHVs and electric motorcycles (EMs). Compared with RHVs, EMs have a lower speed, a smaller

Common-carrier parcel lockers have emerged as a secure, automated, self-service means of delivery consolidation in congested urban areas, which are believed to mitigate last-mile delivery challenges through reducing out-of-vehicle delivery times and consequently vehicle dwell times at the curb. However, little research exists to empirically demonstrate the environmental and efficiency gains from this

With the emergence of the sharing economy and the rapid growth of mobile communications technologies, many novel sharing service models have been developed stemming from ride-hailing. Urban traffic congestion, coupled with energy conservation and emissions reduction, has prompted research on enhancing vehicle seat utilization in taxi service. To offer more effective and reliable ride-hailing, we consider

Several countries and regions have announced sulphur emission control areas (SECAs) to regulate sulphur emissions from ships. Incorporating environmental benefits and economic impacts, a bi-level programming model following the Stackelberg game regime is proposed to capture the SECA design problem for a given coastal area, in which the irregular polygon of the SECA is assumed to be a convex hull and

Since the outbreak of COVID-19, its impacts have been envisaged in multi-dimensional ways, including global supply chains, international logistics, and transportation. Owing to a series of virus variants since 2020, several Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) projects have been halted along the Belt and Road (B&R), and their implementation progress has been affected. In addition, China, which initiated

Electronic business has expanded, resulting in flourishing rural e-commerce globally, and particularly in China. This paper introduces a novel rural public transit system that integrates passenger and freight services—a rural electric bus service that provides services for passengers and e-commerce packages. This blended service reduces logistical costs and generates additional income for the transit

What is the ideal way for a government to regulate an existing transportation monopoly based on the structure of the transport market? We analyze the government’s regulatory problem from the perspective of two possible strategies: partially publicizing the existing monopolist, and entering the transport market directly as a competitor. In a model in which heterogeneous consumers are uniformly distributed

This study analytically investigates the morning commuting and parking patterns of autonomous vehicles (AVs) under different spatial road capacity allocation schemes (i.e., capacity split between inbound and outbound travel directions). Given that self-driving AV might park far away from commuters’ destination, we investigate equilibrium departure/arrival and parking patterns for AVs subject to the

Compared with the traditional brick-and-mortar retail industry, e-commerce has numerous advantages in the collection of consumer demand information, and big data technology can help online platforms forecast accurate demand information from the collected data, which can then be used to improve business operations. To investigate the incentives for sharing the forecast information with or without platform

The COVID-19 pandemic led to a significant breakdown of the traditional retail sector resulting in an unprecedented surge in e-commerce demand for the delivery of essential goods. Consequently, the pandemic raised concerns pertaining to e-retailers’ ability to maintain and efficiently restore level of service in the event of such low-probability high-severity market disruptions. Thus, considering e-retailers’

It is common for sellers to markdown product prices late in a selling season which prompts consumers to strategically manage their purchase timing. Facing consumers’ strategic behaviour, the manufacturer should decide the prices for products carefully to ensure its profit. This paper explores the manufacturer’s optimal pricing decisions in a closed-loop supply chain by considering the customers’ type

In this paper, we study a periodic-review joint inventory and pricing optimization problem in a stochastic price-sensitive demand framework with lost sales. We contribute to the existing literature from three aspects: generalizing the form of demand functions, developing the technique of proving concavity preservation, and extending the scope of optimality conditions. Specifically, we set the demand

This study focuses on an agricultural supply chain with a capital-constrained manufacturer, a bank and an insurer under three power structures: insurer-led Stackelberg (IS), bank-led Stackelberg (BS) and vertical Nash (VN). By establishing a two-level Stackelberg game, we examine the application condition and role of agricultural insurance under three channel structures and reveal the preferences of

Transparent product information is a critical factor that promotes product sales. To satisfy the consumers’ expectation of product quality information, in practice, manufacturers (e.g., Beinmate, Aptamil, and Qiao’s compound) have adopted Blockchain Technology (BT) to help consumers trace the associated product information. In addition, the governments also encourage the application of BT by implementing

This paper develops a price and low-carbon competition model for two vertically differentiated firms, a high-quality manufacturer (HM) and a low-quality manufacturer (LM), with consumers who prefer low-carbon products. The implementation of the cap-and-trade regulation (CATR) by the government is essential for the carbon trading market where firms can choose to buy (resp., sell) carbon quota when the

Currently, there is serious political support for the decarbonization of transport locally, nationally and even internationally. Public transport operators are focusing on the use of electric buses as an opportunity to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and improve air quality. However, using electric buses requires a functional infrastructure of urban charging points. Fast-charging can be made available

The past two decades have witnessed the rapid penetration of emerging market multinational enterprises (EMNEs) into global production networks. Although existing literature documents the agglomeration effect of industrial clusters in affecting firms’ strategic decisions, less is known about how the heterogeneous cluster linkages at the national level affect the foreign market expansion of EMNEs. Based

With the growing interest in and use of online healthcare platforms (OHPs), online medical team (OMT) services have gradually been recognized by physicians as an important multi-channel initiative. However, only a handful of studies have explored the pros and cons of the OMT channel over the traditional individual online service channels in an OHP or examined the critical roles of physicians’ OMT joining

This study investigates the optimal contract design with countervailing incentives under asymmetric selling cost information in a dual-channel supply chain comprising a manufacturer and retailer. The manufacturer’s selling cost is private and determines their reservation profit, which gives rise to type-dependent participation constraints. This study provides several intriguing results. First, when

Plastic waste from fast-moving consumer goods packaging has become a global concern. One solution is home-refill delivery service (HRDS) that offer the distribution of consumable products, including to environmentally conscious customers. This research thus employs an extended Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) with environmental concerns, green perceived value, and trust to explore the factors involved

Timetable, train formation plan and rolling stock circulation are the key operational issues for efficient railway operation. The three issues are optimized sequentially based on the order of the operational plan. Sequential optimization manner cannot balance the costs of the three stages effectively and could create an infeasible solution for a later stage when the resources are limited. In addition

The parcel delivery industry has enjoyed rapid growth with the rise of the e-commerce business. To survive the highly competitive market, service providers have introduced various methods to improve the customer experience, for example, providing faster response or wider delivery coverage. One way is to adopt the territory-based delivery system, in which each courier serves a fixed group of customers

Freight delivery modelling has made significant progress in the past few decades. In this study we propose to use an aggregate multi-step approach to gain a better understanding of the tour-based trips of light commercial vehicles in Sydney, Australia. The paper identifies differences in destination choice-making given by the number of stop and the stop count of the trip, defined by the total number

With the electrification of port equipment, container terminals have become electricity-intensive consumers. The time-of-use (TOU) pricing policy has prompted container terminals to reoptimize their operations planning to decrease electricity costs. However, it is an essential challenge to optimally plan highly correlated operations of a container terminal in response to TOU tariffs. Traditional operations

E-commerce platforms commonly offer price discounts as a loyalty benefit for fee-based members. Some of them disclose the member-only discount, while others strategically hide the specific discount information from non-members, which can be seen as information discrimination between non-members and members. This paper constructs a stylized model to examine whether disclosing or hiding member-only discounts

Despite their current growth and future promise, ride-hailing companies struggle with brand loyalty. As a result, they spend heavily on various marketing tools, especially promotional offers, to encourage passenger engagement, which is often measured by how frequently passengers ride through their platforms. Although extensive research has investigated the passenger intention to continue using ride-hailing

This paper presents an economic analysis of on-demand food-delivery platforms and investigates management strategies that protect restaurant owners and for-hire gig workers in the sharing economy. We consider two markets that are both operated based on sharing economy: (a) the food-delivery market where a platform offers on-demand food-delivery services to customers; and (b) the ride-sourcing market

Electric vehicles (EVs) contribute to carbon emission reduction, but the limitations of existing charging technologies impose a bottleneck to their further diffusion. Addressing the root issues of long waiting time and range anxiety, battery swapping demonstrates great market potential. A swapping service provider may choose between two pricing strategies based on battery rental: pay-per-swap and subscription

This study empirically tested the relationships of multinational enterprises (MNE) and non-MNE customer pressures with the compliance and commitment of garment industry suppliers to climate change adaptation (CCA) and the disaster risk reduction (DRR) goal (sustainable development goal 13). It further investigated the effect of mitigating climate change and disaster risks among sub-suppliers in the

We introduce and study a challenging service network design problem arising within a city logistics company based in Beijing, China. To provide cost-effective same-day delivery services, the company divides the whole urban area into regions. Within each region, a fleet of small-capacity vehicles picks up and delivers packages. A fleet of line-haul vehicles (large-capacity vehicles) executes consistent

Cryptocurrency-based fare-reward scheme has been emerging from on-demand ride-sourcing platforms. The reward scheme provides each passenger with some units of cryptocurrency as rewards for use of ride service. The passengers can redeem the rewards for various redemption options. The redemption options offer the passengers economic benefits to offset a portion of costs of using ride services. In this

Vehicle-based mobile sensing (a.k.a drive-by sensing) is an important means of surveying urban environment by leveraging the mobility of public or private transport vehicles. Buses, for their extensive spatial coverage and reliable operations, have received much attention in drive-by sensing. Existing studies have focused on the assignment of sensors to a set of lines or buses with no operational intervention

One-way car-sharing services have drawn much attention in recent years in transportation research and practice. The flexible operating scheme stimulates patronage but causes unbalanced distributions of the shared cars and consequently low utilization of the services. In light of the empirical evidence that users are willing to cooperate with the operators for relocations, this paper formulates the

This paper proposes a data-driven percolation theory-based approach that analyzes post-disaster traffic network connectivity in the case of earthquakes. The proposed approach’s main contribution is integrating real disaster-related data and percolation theory to analyze scenario-based post-disaster traffic network connectivity. The proposed approach adopts a data-driven estimation function to associate

Opportunism has long been highlighted as one of the hazards of complex buyer–supplier relationships. This hazard has become more challenging to manage as the pressure from consumers and the public for improved sustainability-related performance is passed along the supply chain between buyers and suppliers. For example, buyer demands for and supplier implementation of sustainability requirements, such

Sellers can offer various payment schemes for buyers to boost demand, with the advance, cash, and credit payment policies being popular approaches. To provide further insight into the dynamics of these policies, we consider them in addition to a Disaster Grace Period payment option, which has become increasingly prevalent. The seller’s motivation for offering Advance, Cash, Credit or Disaster Grace

In global supply chains, third-party logistics (3PL) services have proven to be critically important in helping many supply chain agents with distribution tasks so that they can focus on their core competencies of product development and manufacturing. However, there are many inadequacies in current global supply chains that affect the functions of 3PL. These shortcomings have necessitated digital

This paper considers a supply chain structure where an incumbent and an entrant order a critical component sequentially from a common supplier. The incumbent introduces an innovative product whose innovation value is its private information, and the entrant strategically chooses to either imitate the incumbent’s innovation at a cost or introduce a regular product without imitation. The supplier can

Uncertainties in the quality and price of returned items add to the management complexity of remanufacturing system. To achieve the optimal procurement strategy for improved economic performance, this paper develops a mathematical model to quantify the impact of quality-based categorization of returned products under different return scenarios. Through the stochastic analysis of quality uncertainty

Reward-based crowdfunding often exhibits high uncertainty in terms of product quality and market performance; thus, consumers may choose to strategically delay their purchases until crowdfunding succeeds. Price guarantee (PG) is adopted by some crowdfunding platforms to encourage consumers’ participation in crowdfunding, but it also reduces the flexibility to change prices in the future. To address

Blockchain is a driver for digitalization in the fresh industry, but the resulting improvements in each supply chain member’s performance are difficult to predict. In this study, we examine the effects of blockchain-based digital transition in a cold supply chain with a manufacturer, a retailer, and a third-party logistics service provider (3PL). Our study provides several managerial implications.

Owing to the uncertainties of international trade and economic environment, the supply chain risks of global production networks have substantially increased in recent years. In this study, we investigate the supply disruption and international trade risks of an offshoring-based global production network using system dynamics simulation and game theory. The production network is formed by two contract

Disaster relief logistics (DRL) provides adequate relief supplies to victims of natural disasters (e.g., earthquakes and volcanic eruptions). This study explicitly considers supplier selection and inventory pre-positioning corresponding to static preparedness decisions, and post-disaster procurement and delivery associated with dynamic response decisions in actual DRL operations. To tackle issues triggered

Various deterministic models for economic ship speed optimisation exist in the literature, but none considered the time charter contract, and in particular the influence of the redelivery time. This paper studies the economic optimal speed of a ship on a (time) charter contract through the development of an Operational Research (OR) optimisation model. The ship charterer’s objective is to maximise

In this paper, we study the logistics outsourcing strategy of a manufacturer with regard to green logistics, greenwashing, and blockchain. The manufacturer sells its products through an e-commerce platform, which has self-built logistics service. To transport the products to the customers, the manufacturer can choose to outsource this logistics service to the e-commerce platform or a third-party logistics

As a critical infrastructure system of modern society, the global liner shipping network (GLSN) has become increasingly complex and thus vulnerable to disruptions. This study proposes a resilience assessment framework for the GLSN across two dimensions, including static resilience and dynamic resilience. First, by leveraging high-frequency vessel movement data, the GLSN is constructed. Then, with the

An important relationship in cargo handling at cargo ports is the shipper economic demand function for cargo port services, which relates the demand for cargo port services to the prices charged by cargo ports and the cargo demand from shippers at other cargo ports. To our knowledge, such a function has heretofore not been rigorously derived in the maritime economics literature. This note derives a