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Shelf space is often retailer's critical resource. Growing number of products has posed a challenge to the retailers for efficient allocation of available shelf space to them. The paper aims to consider a retail shelf space allocation problem with linear profit function and aims to develop efficient heuristics to solve this problem.

The paper develops three heuristics to solve a shelf space allocation problem. It compares three heuristics with existing heuristic using empirical study.

In an empirical study of 320 randomly generated instances of problems with size (products, shelves) varying from (25, 5) to (200, 50), it was found that all three new heuristics are competitive with existing heuristic. The best amongst three heuristics found solution with average objective value of 99.59 percent of upper bound in a reasonable central processing unit time.

The linearity assumption of the profit function is based on earlier findings that marginal returns to space first increase and then decrease in an S‐shaped curve. Hence, linearity assumption for profit function is justified by the fact that retails would want to operate on linear (or approximately linear) and more strongly increasing part of the curve.

The proposed heuristics are applied to a case of existing retail store which gave more profit than the current allocation scheme.

The paper proposes new initial constructor and neighbourhood move strategy to develop efficient heuristic. Heuristics proposed in this paper are competitive with existing heuristics.

The purpose of this paper is to understand the dimensions of the e-fulfillment process and its influence on customers in pure e-tailing; to classify the pertinent literature that has evolved over time addressing relevant managerial issues; and to identify the gaps between the practices prevalent in the e-fulfillment and those suggested by academicians to develop insights for future research.

A critical systemic literature review approach was used for the study with quantitative and qualitative analysis.

The authors identified seven dimensions of e-fulfillment in the literature on pure e-tailing: e-business quality, product quality, pricing, availability, timeliness, condition and ease of return and explored its linkages with shopping satisfaction and repurchase intention of customers in e-tailing.

The study was skewed toward an empirical approach. The study does not include many of the analytical models in this space.

This study helps e-tailers, academicians and practitioners understand critical dimensions of e-fulfillment and its influence on customers in the pure e-tailing setting in order to design customer-centric e-fulfillment architecture.

The study identified seven dimensions of e-fulfillment in the literature and explored its influence on shopping satisfaction and repurchase intention of customers in pure e-tailing. This is the first compilation of standalone/isolated studies available in the literature to provide e-tailers and academicians meaningful insights into e-fulfillment in the pure e-tailing setting.

Due to the ever increasing concern toward sustainability, suppliers nowadays are evaluated on the basis of environmental performances. The data on supplier’s performance are not always available in quantitative form and evaluating supplier on the basis of qualitative data is a challenging task. The purpose of this paper is to develop a framework for the selection of suppliers by evaluating them on the basis of both quantitative and qualitative data.

Literature on sustainability, green supply chain and lean practices related to supplier selection is critically reviewed. Based on this, a two phase fuzzy goal programming approach integrating hyperbolic membership function is proposed to solve the complex supplier selection problem.

Results obtained through the proposed approach are compared to the traditional models (Jadidi et al., 2014; Ozkok and Tiryaki, 2011; Zimmermann, 1978) of supplier selection and were found to be optimal as it achieves higher aspiration level.

The proposed model is adaptive to solve real world problems of supplier selection as all criteria do not possess the same weights, so the managers can change the criteria and their weights according to their requirement.

This paper provides the decision makers a robust framework to evaluate and select sustainable supplier based on both quantitative and qualitative data. The results obtained through the proposed model achieve greater satisfaction level as compared to those achieved by traditional methods.

The purpose of this paper is to present the simulation model for manpower planning in electrical maintenance service facility and evaluates different scenarios to improve resource utilization while meeting the desired service level.

The process systematically maps entire system of electrical fault rectification, identifies probability distributions of demand of electrical maintenance requests and its process times using historical data. The simulation software Arena was used to model the entire system and various possible improvements were evaluated to assess performance of maintenance service facility.

The simulation results obtained for the proposed changes in the system indicated the potential improvement in resource utilization while meeting the average waiting time expectations of customers.

The proposed simulation model can help maintenance people to decide the optimum number of resources to meet the agreed performance level that is expected by various stakeholders.

The paper considers the computer simulation in modeling complex real-life system for understanding the resource requirement of electrical fault maintenance facility to improve resource utilization while meeting the desired service level.

Online food delivery (OFD) has witnessed momentous consumer adoption in the past few years, and COVID-19, if anything, is only accelerating its growth. This paper captures numerous intricate issues arising from the complex relationship among the stakeholders because of the enhanced scale of the OFD business. The purpose of this paper is to highlight publication trends in OFD and identify potential future research themes.

The authors conducted a tri-method study – systematic literature review, bibliometric and thematic content analysis – of 43 articles on OFD published in 24 journals from 2015 to 2021 (March). The authors used VOSviewer to perform citation analysis.

Systematic literature review of the existing OFD research resulted in six potential research themes. Further, thematic content analysis synthesized and categorized the literature into four knowledge clusters, namely, (i) digital mediation in OFD, (ii) dynamic OFD operations, (iii) OFD adoption by consumers and (iv) risk and trust issues in OFD. The authors also present the emerging trends in terms of the most influential articles, authors and journals.

This paper captures the different facets of interactions among various OFD stakeholders and highlights the intricate issues and challenges that require immediate attention from researchers and practitioners.

This is one of the few studies to synthesize OFD literature that sheds light on unexplored aspects of complex relationships among OFD stakeholders through four clusters and six research themes through a conceptual framework.

Pay-what-you-want (PWYW) is a pricing strategy implemented in a variety of settings like supermarkets and museums, in which consumers determine the price they are willing to pay for a product or service based on their perceived utility. The authors propose an analytical model to investigate the impact of PWYW delivery pricing on the online food delivery (OFD) platforms.

Using a game-theoretic model, the authors characterize the equilibrium as a function of the platform's average delivery cost and the consumer's social preferences parameters like fairness and reciprocity. The authors derive the parametric conditions under which PWYW generates higher profits for the platform compared to the traditional pay-as-asked delivery pricing.

For the PWYW strategy to be profitable, the average delivery cost to the platform should be low. Therefore, OFD platform managers should focus on reducing delivery costs. The authors also identify the feasible region in which the platform managers need to maintain the consumer's social preferences.

Under PWYW, the authors recommend that the platform managers impose a minimum delivery fee which consumers can use as a benchmark to minimize zero delivery fee payments and consumers' free-riding tendencies simultaneously. This allows OFD platforms to extract online orders from highly price-conscious consumers.

This is one of the first studies to explore the innovative application of PWYW to a particular segment of delivery pricing in OFD platforms. The authors establish that the overall consumer surplus and social welfare are higher under the PWYW strategy, forming a solid ground for its implementation in OFD platforms.