The paper “Feeding the Nation—Dynamic Customer Contacting for E-Fulfillment in Times of Crisis” written by Jonas Schwamberger, Moritz Fleischmann, and Arne Strauss investigates proactive customer contacting by online retailers during a demand surge, such as in the COVID crisis. It shows how to employ proactive customer contacting as a means to tailor the allocation of scarce capacity. A key insight is that, for realistic data, the implicit price for protecting vulnerable customers is relatively low.
The paper is available in Service Science.
New Publication on Last-Mile Delivery in Online Retailing
