Search results

Business-to-consumer e-commerce results in deliveries to consumers. Before evaluating the impact on urban networks, it is necessary to describe and understand the underlying logistics. Certain sectors, e.g. food products, require specific solutions.

Distribution systems are presented as an alternative to private shopping trips. However, the costs of order handling (order-picking, packaging) and home deliveries are still high and not always covered by the price paid by the consumer. On the whole, the profitability of on-line retailing is uncertain and the number of clients limited.

There has been substantial interest in US cesarean rates, which increased from 5% of deliveries in the 1970s to nearly one-third of births by the mid-2000s. Explanations typically emphasize individual risk factors (e.g., advanced maternal age, increased BMI, and greater desire for control over delivery) of women giving birth, or address institutional factors, such as the medicalization of childbirth and the culture of liability leading physicians to practice defensive medicine. We focus here on another non-medical explanation – childbirth education (CBE). CBE is an important, underexplored mechanism that can shape women’s expectations about labor and birth and potentially lead them to expect, or desire, a cesarean delivery as a normalized outcome. We analyze data from three waves (2002, 2006, 2013) of the Listening to Mothers national survey on US women’s childbearing experiences (n = 3,985). Using logistic regression analysis, we examined both mode of delivery (vaginal versus cesarean), and attitudes about future request for elective cesarean among both primiparous and multiparous women. Despite previous research suggesting that CBE increased the likelihood of vaginal delivery, we find that CBE attendance was not associated with likelihood of vaginal delivery among either primiparous or multiparous women. However, both primiparous and multiparous women who attended CBE classes were significantly more likely to say they would request a future, elective cesarean. Furthermore, these effects were in the opposite direction of effects for natural birth attitudes. Our findings suggest that contemporary CBE classes may be a form of “anticipatory socialization”, potentially priming women’s acceptance of medicalized childbirth.

E-commerce businesses have been undergoing rapid development for the last five years in the United States and for the past two years in Europe. This sustained growth illustrates the existence of a demand for this type of service, particularly among the youth. Beyond the startup phase, e-commerce companies are continuing to generate significant losses, which point to organisational defects, the most serious being logistic support to this business. Analysis of the e-commerce issue is delicate, given the haziness of the activity's perimeter. E-commerce startups offer services similar to traditional mail-order, and consumer retailing is not clearly stating its objectives in creating its own e-commerce sites.

Logistics is not an organisational technique that is adapted to the rapid and unpredictable changes that e-commerce is experiencing today. Logistics related problems in e-commerce vary according to the type of commercial activity involved, but they are often considerable and sometimes result from the precipitation with which these activities were set up.

This chapter introduces linguistic delivery style to auditing research, demonstrates how linguistic delivery style relates to client credibility, and shows how linguistic delivery style and client credibility influences auditors’ judgment. Two hundred auditors participated in an analytical procedures task. The results indicate that high client credibility and powerful linguistic delivery style increase the auditor's assessed likelihood that the explanation accounts for the fluctuation and decrease their intent to perform additional testing. Moreover, powerless linguistic delivery style from an otherwise high credibility client leads to auditor judgments and intentions that are indistinguishable from those that arise from a low credibility client. Finally, evidence indicates that linguistic delivery style is a fourth component of credibility.

The service industry is a major component of the economy. Raw material, components, assemblies, and finished products are shipped between suppliers, manufacturers, distributors, and retailers. Accordingly, timely receipt of shipped goods is crucial in maintaining the efficiency and effectiveness of such service processes. A service provider offers an incentive to the customer by specifying a competitive target time for delivery of goods. Further, if the delivery time is deviant from the target value, the provider offers to reimburse the customer for an amount that is proportional to the value of the goods and the degree of deviation from the target value. The service provider may set the price to be charged as a function of product value. This price is in addition to the operational costs of logistics that are not considered in the formulated model. For protection against deviation from target due dates, the service provider agrees to reimburse the customer. The reimbursement could be based on an asymmetric loss function influenced by the degree of deviation from the target due date as well as product value. The penalties could be different for early and late deliveries since the customer may experience different impact and consequences accordingly. The chapter develops a model to determine the amount (price) that the provider should add to the cost estimate of the delivery contract for protection against delivery deviations. Such a cost estimate will include the operational costs (fixed and variable) of the shipment, to which an amount is added to cover the expected payout to customers when the delivery time deviates from the target value. The optimal price should be such that the expected revenue will at least exceed the expected payout.

Demand for goods/services has increased in Latin America due to urbanization, leading to a complex delivery system and increased logistical activities. In Quito, the Historic Center and La Mariscal are two zones that face logistical challenges. The objective of this chapter is to analyze the commercial logistic activities related to loading and unloading goods in these zones. To address this urban freight problem, this chapter proposes a solution through the calculation of the optimal number and location of loading and unloading bays in each zone based on actual commercial activity data. First, a delivery survey was completed in each zone regarding frequency and amount of deliveries. Then, based on the data obtained, an optimization model is proposed to determine the optimal number and location of loading and unloading bays. Finally, a simulation model of the delivery process is performed to readjust the bay’s optimal number. A total number of 75 and 98 bays were calculated to serve the total shopping district of a representative square kilometer (km²) of the Historic Center and La Mariscal. This solution aims to minimize the delivery time and the distance for deliveries, improve urban freight transportation, and reduce traffic. This study could be used as a baseline and guide for further research in urban logistics, especially in Latin America, where urban logistics is still under study. This chapter is part of a Research Project of Urban Logistics in Quito, led by Universidad San Francisco de Quito (USFQ), in association with the Megacity Logistics Lab of MIT.

This paper provides an extensive review of surveys and data-collection programmes focused on urban goods movement (UGM). Surveys investigating passenger urban travel have a decades-long tradition. The same is not true for UGM. The first specific UGM surveys appeared about 10 years ago in response to the rapid growth of car traffic, congestion, pollution and lack of space. Most of the time, these surveys have been carried out to resolve specific, local problems concerning traffic. Only a few of them have taken a global approach to urban logistics by including all logistics operators (own-account and carriers), all delivery vehicles (heavy and light vehicles), all deliveries and pickups (from express to full payload) and an entire metropolitan area and surroundings. Due to various European programmes, an inventory has been created to analyse urban goods data collection according to spatial level and methodology of capture. With this inventory, European urban freight indicators can be described, along with the units in which they are measured and their purposes. The relevance of urban goods transport surveys lies in their capacity to give decision-makers an account of urban freight transport functioning, ratios and data, so as to help in formulating planning, regulation and forecasting. It appears that focusing on the movement (delivery/pick-up), as the unit of analysis in establishment-driver surveys is the most efficient approach to describe the generation of vehicular flow in the city. This fact is revealed in the French UGM surveys, which take into account the complexity of urban logistics.

Empirical evidence of the hedging pressure risk premium exists only in the futures contracts with delivery-related options. Since hedging pressure is supposed to exist for all futures contracts, the empirical evidence raises an interesting empirical question: whether the hedging pressure risk premium is in fact the risk premium associated with the delivery-related options. This chapter contains an empirical test of the non-redundancy between the two related but alternative sources of non-market risks. For the test, we employs a futures risk premia model in which the expected futures returns contain the market risk premium (proxied by the equity market risk premium) and two non-market risk premia (proxied by the hedging pressure effect and by the delivery risk premium reflected in the returns of futures options, respectively). Our main finding is that both the hedging pressure and the delivery risk premia are non-redundant and statistically significant for futures contracts with delivery-related options. This finding implies a substantial degree of segmentations between these futures markets and the underlying asset markets.