Logistics service sharing in cross-border e-commerce
研究国内外零售商通过物流服务共享合作缓解高物流成本和消费者信任问题，发现合作可实现双赢，且合作定价机制优于非合作机制。
While the demand for cross-border e-commerce has grown rapidly, challenges have emerged for both retailers and consumers participating in this global market. Retailers have been struggling with high logistics costs to fulfill cross-border demand, while the lack of trust in foreign retailers is a major issue for consumers. In this paper, we study a cross-border collaboration scheme between a domestic and a foreign retailer to mitigate these challenges. This entails a co-opetition framework where the domestic retailer performs the last-mile delivery of the foreign retailer’s orders in exchange for a logistics service fee. We model demand via a Multinomial Logit (MNL) choice model where the consumers are trust- and price-sensitive. We compare the market outcomes of the two retailers in “pre-collaboration” and “post-collaboration” settings. We find that there exist win-win outcomes where both retailers benefit from collaboration under realistic settings. We also show that a cooperative mechanism can lead to higher profits for both retailers compared to the non-cooperative mechanism for setting the logistics service fee, if the contract terms are decided carefully.