Anmerkungen:
Nach Informationen von SSRN wurde die ursprüngliche Fassung des Dokuments April 29, 2020 erstellt
Beschreibung:
Inspired by several recent startups, we study an on-demand delivery service that lets cus-tomers shop online for products from a number of brick and mortar stores. The customer ordersare fulfilled by a fleet of personal shoppers who are responsible for both the shopping of ordersat the stores and the delivery of these to customer locations. The operation of such a servicerequires to dynamically manage new requests, coordinate a fleet of shoppers, schedule shoppingoperations at stores, and execute deliveries to customers on time.Our work presents three operational strategies, each requiring different levels of shopperflexibility and implementation complexity. We quantify the performance of each strategy in avast family of computational experiments. Also, the performance of this on-demand shoppingservice is compared to a setting in which customers travel to stores to shop themselves. Ournumerical experiments show that there are significant savings in resources spent in shopping (upto 55.2%) when this activity is outsourced