Dynamic pricing of flexible time slots for attended home delivery

Arne Strauss, Nalan Gülpınar and Yijun Zheng

European Journal of Operational Research, 2021, vol. 294, issue 3, 1022-1041

Abstract: In e-commerce, customers are usually offered a menu of home delivery time windows of which they need to select exactly one, even though at least some customers may be more flexible. To exploit the flexibility of such customers, we propose to introduce flexible delivery time slots, defined as any combination of such regular time windows (not necessarily adjacent). In selecting a flexible time slot (out of a set of windows that form the flexible product), the customer agrees to be informed only shortly prior to the dispatching of the delivery vehicle in which regular time window the goods will arrive. In return for providing this flexibility, the company may offer the customer a reduced delivery charge and/or highlight the environmental benefits. Our framework also can accommodate customized flexible slots where customers can self-select a set of regular slots in which a delivery may take place.

Keywords: Revenue management; E-commerce; Flexible product; Dynamic programming (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (15)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0377221720302216
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ejores:v:294:y:2021:i:3:p:1022-1041

DOI: 10.1016/j.ejor.2020.03.007

Access Statistics for this article

European Journal of Operational Research is currently edited by Roman Slowinski, Jesus Artalejo, Jean-Charles. Billaut, Robert Dyson and Lorenzo Peccati

More articles in European Journal of Operational Research from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().