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

NSF的这笔拨款将通过数字实验来探索城市商品的流动、定价和社会正义。这些实验将基于一系列新的城市货运模型，而不是昂贵的现场测量。这些模型将被用来研究五个基本假设：(1)城市货运服务质量可以通过交通网络和路线重新配置来提高；(2)城市货运服务持续、长期较差的城市社区有时会自发出现，但它们的影响可能会通过激励和补贴货运服务提供商而得到实质性改善；(3)目前对大型上市电子零售商提供的商品的需求可能是不可持续的，因为它们目前使用内部补贴和隐性成本来资助极低的运费，从而产生了一种资金不足的负债，投资者通过这种负债牺牲利润来换取市场份额；(4)当减少补贴并显化隐藏的运输成本时，可能会对运营商、电子零售商和家庭产生有害影响；以及(5)食品供应不足地区(FUA)是由于对健康食品的相对较低的需求和相对较高的供应链成本共同产生的--创造了一种食品甜点，对无法找到负担得起的优质食品替代来源的社会成员构成了严重的社会不公平。预期的城市货运家庭模式将明确地动态并基于博弈论。这些模型将描述城市货运系统在家庭层面的电子商务中的作用，包括明确识别食品递送。在评估上述假设时，将遵循仔细的实验设计。因此，模型系列以及评估假设的实验将解决以下考虑：(1)城市货运公司之间相互竞争，不仅争夺市场份额，而且争夺通勤者和租车服务也重视的城市路线和停车；(2)大都市公路网上的车辆和消费品流动存在不可否认的动态方面；此外，这些流动涉及多个时间尺度，使得比较静态范式几乎没有意义；(3)为了具有竞争力，电子零售商(电子零售商)被卷入定价游戏，故意模糊送货费和购买商品价格之间的区别，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不能完全覆盖送货成本；(5)一些电子零售商提供折扣和促销运费，造成资金不足的负债，使人怀疑其核心交易的中长期可持续性；(6)对健康食品的需求与最小订单量之间存在差距，这使得食品供应商有必要向某些社区提供食品，从而创造出服务不足的地区。这一奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势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. The models will be used 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; and (5) food underserved areas (FUAs) arise from the combination of relatively low demand for and relatively high supply chain costs of healthy food items - creating a food dessert that represents a serious social injustice to 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; (5) 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 (6) 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.