Crowdsourced delivery and other sharing economy platforms attract freelance workers by offering them flexibility in scheduling their own work hours. Those platforms, however, have been criticized for the lack of protection they offer workers. Since workers are treated as independent contractors,...

Consider a family of SKUs for which the supplier will offer a quantity discount, according to the aggregate purchases of the product group. Management of those items is based on the modified periodic policy. From the supplier's point of view, what are the optimal parameters (breakpoint and...

Quantity discounts have been broadly examined in decisions on the sale or purchase of goods. The analysis of coordinating the discount decisions for the retailer (buyer), the wholesaler (supplier), and the public transportation service provider (Less-Than-Truckload carrier), however, is still in...

In this paper we consider a distribution planning problem in a transshipment network under stochastic customer demand, to account for uncertainty faced in real-life applications when planning distribution activities. To date, considerations of randomness in distribution planning networks with...

We consider the shipment consolidation and freight forwarding problem under two discount schemes: the system-wide and the double-discount. In the system-wide scheme, the cost associated with one flight does not only depend on the quantity of freight assigned to that flight, but also on the total...

Firms such as Wal-Mart and Campbell's Soup have successfully implemented vendor managed inventory (VMI). Articles in the trade press and academic literature often begin with the premise that VMI is ‘beneficial'; but beneficial to which party and under what conditions? We consider in this paper...

One usually thinks of logistics as an “outbound” activity, e.g. the physical distribution of finished products from factory to warehouse to retailer. A firm’s Logistics Information System (LIS) would thus generally be designed to support these outbound shipments. However, when a...

General Motors of Canada is undertaking a multimillion-dollar modernization of its Oshawa, Ontario assembly plant. Automatic guided vehicles (AGVs) and a substantial amount of robotics and other automation will be used in the body-framing area. We developed a computer simulation model to...

Expert systems (ES) have produced much excitement in recent years. Because a great deal of experience and knowledge are captured in the ES, there may be no need to consult a specialist for every decision in the given area. A properly designed expert system thus has in its knowledge base a wide...

Quantity discounts are a useful mechanism for coordination. Here we investigate such discounts from the supplier's perspective, both from a non-cooperative game-theoretical approach and a joint decision model. Taking into account the price elasticity of demand, this analysis aids a sole supplier...