Profit or Growth? Dynamic Order Allocation in a Hybrid Workforce

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: He, Eryn Juan; Goh, Joel
• 署名单位: National University of Singapore; National University of Singapore; Harvard University
• 刊物名称: MANAGEMENT SCIENCE
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0025-1909
• DOI: 10.1287/mnsc.2021.4177
• 发表日期: 2022
• 页码: 5891-5906
• 关键词: on-demand platform; market thickness; cross-network effects; dynamic order allocation

摘要

Modern digital technology has enabled the emergence of the hybrid workforce in service organizations, where a firm uses on-demand freelancers to augment its traditional labor supply of employees. Freelancers are typically supplied by an electronic platform. How should demand be allocated between employees and freelancers? Under what conditions is the system(comprising the firm and its platform) sustainable in the long run? We investigate these questions in the context of last-mile delivery. We develop a discrete-time, stochastic dynamic program that captures the system's profit from serving demand and the platform's growth dynamics. The dynamic model incorporates a service constraint for the platform and a simple version of a stochastic network effect. We find that the answers to our research questions critically depend on two key parameters: the mean and variance of the cross-network effect. We conduct a numerical study with data froma last-mile delivery firm in Vietnamto illustrate our findings.