An incentive-based delivery scheme and its effect evaluated via explainable machine learning

Yang Wang, Yu Sun, Jianhui Lai, Yanyan Chen and José Holguín-Veras

Transport Policy, 2025, vol. 162, issue C, 559-574

Abstract: The current delivery mode acquiesces E-shopping consumers to provide only a single address for delivery, despite their potential to have multiple addresses available. Inspired by this, we propose a new delivery mode with an economic incentive scheme to encourage consumers to provide more addresses and empower the delivery operator to determine the final delivery address following a certain optimization criteria. To examine the incentive's effect, we conducted a survey. The survey reveals a substantial, near-linear impact on promoting multiple address provision through the incentive, resulting in a 32% increase in consumers providing additional addresses. We develop an eXtreme Gradient Boosting model, which outperformed Logistic Regression and Support Vector Machine, to explore the relationship between address provision decision and E-shopping behavior. Augmented by Shapley Additive Explanations, the model can interpret how both the incentive and E-shopping behavior influence address provision. In addition to the incentive, factors such as the number of available addresses and the average price of the parcel also significantly influence the decision-making process for providing delivery addresses. The insights extracted from this study can provide a foundation for policymakers to establish more practical delivery management policies.

Keywords: Urban delivery management policy; Delivery address number; Economic reward; E-shopping behavior (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0967070X25000046
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:trapol:v:162:y:2025:i:c:p:559-574

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/supportfaq.cws_home/regional
https://shop.elsevie ... _01_ooc_1&version=01

DOI: 10.1016/j.tranpol.2025.01.004

Access Statistics for this article

Transport Policy is currently edited by Y. Hayashi

More articles in Transport Policy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().