Collaborative Research: Urban Goods Movements, Pricing, and Social Justice

这项NSF拨款将通过数值实验来探索城市货物流动、定价和社会公正。这些实验将以一系列新的城市货运模型为基础，取代昂贵的实地测量。除了创建城市货运模型家族之外，我们计划用它们来研究五个主要假设：(1)通过交通网络和路线重构可以提高城市货运服务质量。(2)城市货运服务持续、长期较差的城市街区有时会自发出现，但通过对货运服务提供者的激励和补贴，其影响可能会得到实质性改善。(3)目前对大型上市电子零售商提供的商品的需求可能无法持续，因为它们目前使用内部补贴和隐性成本来支付极低的运费，从而造成一种无资金准备的负债，投资者通过这种负债牺牲利润来获得市场份额。(4)当补贴被缩减，隐性运输成本被明确时，可能会对运营商、电子零售商和家庭产生有害影响。(5)食品服务不足地区（Food underserved areas, FUAs）是由健康食品需求相对较低和供应链成本相对较高共同造成的。食物甜点的存在是一种严重的社会不公正，给那些找不到可负担得起的优质食物替代来源的社会成员带来了日常伤害。城市货运模型的预期家族将是明确动态的，并基于博弈论。这些模型将从家庭层面描述城市货运系统在电子商务中的作用，包括对食品配送的明确认可。在评估上述假设时，将遵循仔细的实验设计。因此，预期的模型家族，以及评估假设的实验，将解决以下问题：(1)城市货运公司相互竞争，不仅争夺市场份额，而且争夺城市路线和停车位，这也是通勤者和租车服务所重视的；(2)城市道路网络中车辆和消费品的流动具有不可否认的动态性；此外，这些流动涉及多个时间尺度，这使得比较静力学范式几乎毫无意义；(3)为了保持竞争力，电子零售商（电子零售商）被卷入定价游戏，故意模糊运费和购买商品价格之间的区别，其结果是有必要同时模拟货运服务和城市商品供应；(4)有间接证据表明，电子商务中采用的定价策略并没有完全覆盖配送成本；(8)一些电子零售商提供折扣和促销运费，造成无资金负债，使其核心交易的中期和长期可持续性受到怀疑；(9)对健康食品的需求与最低订购量之间存在差距，这使得食品供应商值得向某些社区提供食品，从而创造了食品供应不足的地区。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

This NSF grant will explore urban goods movements, pricing, and social justice through numerical experiments. The experiments will be based on a new family of urban freight models, in lieu of expensive field measurements. In addition to creating the family of urban freight models, we plan to use them to investigate five primary hypotheses: (1) urban freight quality of service may be enhanced through traffic network and route reconfiguration. (2) urban neighborhoods with persistent, chronically inferior urban freight service sometimes emerge spontaneously, but their impact may be substantially ameliorated through incentivizing and subsidizing freight service providers. (3) The present demand for goods provisioned by large, publicly traded electronic retailers might not be sustainable because of their current use of internal subsidies and hidden costs to fund extremely low shipping fees, creating an unfunded liability through which investors sacrifice profits for market share. (4) When subsidies are scaled down and hidden shipping costs are made explicit, deleterious impacts on carriers, e-retailers and households may arise. (5) Food underserved areas (FUAs) arise from the combination of relatively low demand for and relatively high supply chain costs of healthy food items. The presence of food desserts is a serious social injustice that brings daily harm to those members of society who cannot find alternative sources of affordable, quality food.The intended family of urban freight models will be explicitly dynamic and based on game theory. The models will depict the role urban freight systems in electronic commerce at the household level, including explicit recognition of food deliveries. A careful experimental design will be followed in assessing the aforementioned hypotheses. Accordingly, the intended family of models, as well as the experiments to assess hypotheses, will address the following considerations: (1) urban freight carriers compete with one another, not only for market share but also for urban routes and parking that are also valued by commuters and hired ride services; (2) there is an undeniable dynamic aspect to the flows of vehicles and consumption goods over metropolitan road networks; moreover, those flows involve multiple time scales that make the comparative statics paradigm nearly meaningless; (3) in an effort to be competitive, electronic retailers (e-retailers) are drawn into pricing games that purposely blur the distinction between delivery fees and the prices of purchased goods, with the consequence that it is necessary to simultaneously model both freight service and urban goods provisioning; (4) indirect evidence exists that pricing strategies employed in e-commerce do not fully cover delivery costs; (8) some electronic retailers offer discounted and promotional shipping rates, creating unfunded liabilities that bring into doubt both the medium- and long-term sustainability of their core transactions; and (9) there is a gap between the demand for healthy foods and the minimum order size that makes it worthwhile for food purveyors to deliver to certain neighborhoods, thereby creating food underserved areas.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.