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Economies of Product Diversity in Collaborative Logistics
Author(s) -
Suzuki Yoshinori,
Lu ShihHao
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
journal of business logistics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.611
H-Index - 79
eISSN - 2158-1592
pISSN - 0735-3766
DOI - 10.1111/jbl.12153
Subject(s) - truck , diversity (politics) , product (mathematics) , industrial organization , business , commerce , marketing , engineering , aerospace engineering , geometry , mathematics , sociology , anthropology
Collaborative logistics , also known as shipper collaboration , is a method of reducing the freight logistics cost of firms that produce and/or distribute tangible goods (shippers), which seeks to improve capacity utilizations of trucks. This study looks at this shipper collaboration problem in the U.S. truckload ( TL ) industry and proposes a new approach. Unlike other studies, which focused on reducing TL costs by utilizing economies of density , we present an approach that utilizes specific TL economies gained by mixing multiple products with different weight‐to‐volume ratios, which we call economies of product diversity . Using theoretical and empirical evidence, we show that the performance of shipper collaboration can be enhanced notably using this concept, economies of product diversity, which is currently overlooked in the literature.