Fee-based membership free shipping is an important shipping fee schedule in E-Commerce. This paper studies how the membership free shipping (MFS) program affects firm competition and how to set the membership fee optimally. We find MFS relaxes price competition. The firm that adopts MFS has a higher pricing band than the other firm. Both firms have positive profits, strictly better than when me...

The Internet has radically reduced the cost of collecting and distributing information. Consequently, researchers initially predicted that the resulting price transparency would drive prices toward a single market price. However, this has largely not happened, partly because retailers use shipping costs to make prices less comparable. Using data on 517,048 offers of 895 retailers from a leading...

Rapid loss of sea ice is opening up the Arctic Ocean to shipping, a practice that is forecasted to increase rapidly by 2050 when many models predict that the Arctic Ocean will largely be free of ice toward the end of summer. These forecasts carry considerable uncertainty because Arctic shipping was previously considered too sparse to allow for adequate validation. Here, we provide quantitative ...

287 Numerous organizations are involved in distributing goods and materials. When shipping alternatives exist, the selection of the appropriate shipping alternative (mode) for each shipment may result in significant cost savings. This paper describes a highly flexible dispatching system that selects the shipping mode to be used for each shipment while minimizing the overall shipping costs. Mult...

To explore the concept of connectivity and trade relativity (CTR), this paper presents a research model to illustrate: (1) the impact of shipping connectivity on two types of trade flows, and (2) the mediating effect of intra-regional trade (“intra-trade”) on the relationship between shipping connectivity and extra-regional trade (“extra-trade”). Understanding the relationships among shipping c...

This paper deals with the application of System dynamics and Chaos theory in shipping using the example of freight rate forming. The development of new technologies, changes in structure and conditions, information accessibility, etc. are only some of the factors that intensify changes in freight rate forming in shipping. Therefore, shipping environment is becoming increasingly complex and dyna...

Shipping, which accounts for 2.6% of global carbon dioxide emissions, is urged to find clean energy solutions decarbonise the industry and achieve International Maritime Organization (IMO)’s greenhouse gas (GHG) emission targets by 2050. It generally believed that hydrogen will play a vital role in enabling use renewable sources. However, issues related with storage distribution currently obstr...

This dissertation studies the effect of customer considerations in stochastic optimization problems in the service industry. The first part looks at problems in the service industry geared towards providing efficient service, i.e., minimizing the total cost of providing service while ensuring that certain service level targets are met. In particular, we study applications in the call center ind...