Business Commons^™

Sharing Economy Last Mile Delivery: Three Essays Addressing Operational Challenges, Customer Expectations, And Supply Uncertainty, Nicolò Masorgo

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Last mile delivery has become a critical competitive dimension facing retail supply chains. At the same time, the emergence of sharing economy platforms has introduced unique operational challenges and benefits that enable and inhibit retailers’ last mile delivery goals. This dissertation investigates key challenges faced by crowdshipping platforms used in last mile delivery related to crowdsourced delivery drivers, driver-customer interaction, and customer expectations. We investigate the research questions of this dissertation through a multi-method design approach, complementing a rich archival dataset comprised of several million orders retrieved from a Fortune 100 retail crowdshipping platform, with scenario-based experiments. Specifically, the first …