Economies of Product Diversity in Collaborative Logistics
研究美国整车运输行业中，通过混合不同重量体积比的产品来降低物流成本的新方法，即产品多样性的经济性，对物流管理者有参考价值。
Collaborative logistics , also known as shipper collaboration , is a method of reducing the freight logistics cost of firms that produce and/or distribute tangible goods (shippers), which seeks to improve capacity utilizations of trucks. This study looks at this shipper collaboration problem in the U.S. truckload ( TL ) industry and proposes a new approach. Unlike other studies, which focused on reducing TL costs by utilizing economies of density , we present an approach that utilizes specific TL economies gained by mixing multiple products with different weight‐to‐volume ratios, which we call economies of product diversity . Using theoretical and empirical evidence, we show that the performance of shipper collaboration can be enhanced notably using this concept, economies of product diversity, which is currently overlooked in the literature.