Profit or Growth? Dynamic Order Allocation in a Hybrid Workforce
研究了服务企业如何在员工和自由职业者之间分配订单，以平衡利润和平台增长，发现交叉网络效应的均值和方差是关键因素。
Modern digital technology has enabled the emergence of the hybrid workforce in service organizations, where a firm uses on-demand freelancers to augment its traditional labor supply of employees. Freelancers are typically supplied by an electronic platform. How should demand be allocated between employees and freelancers? Under what conditions is the system (comprising the firm and its platform) sustainable in the long run? We investigate these questions in the context of last-mile delivery. We develop a discrete-time, stochastic dynamic program that captures the system’s profit from serving demand and the platform’s growth dynamics. The dynamic model incorporates a service constraint for the platform and a simple version of a stochastic network effect. We find that the answers to our research questions critically depend on two key parameters: the mean and variance of the cross-network effect. We conduct a numerical study with data from a last-mile delivery firm in Vietnam to illustrate our findings. This paper was accepted by Vishal Gaur, operations management.