Crowdsourcing technology platforms specializing in on‐demand last mile delivery face a novel problem—heightened agent independence increases uncertainty in last mile delivery and has the potential to undermine operational performance. Uncertainty emanates from drivers' competing interests, or opportunity costs. Rather than increase remuneration, some platforms have designed the technology to allow customers to tip, but the subsequent effects on driver behavior and last mile performance have not yet been studied. We explore this feature of on‐demand delivery technology design—customer tipping—and its implications for crowdsourced delivery performance. Using netnography and secondary data sources, we empirically ground an adaptive, multi‐agent hybrid simulation to propose how customer tipping impacts service performance through context‐contingent driver behavior. Our results generally indicate that tipping as a technology design feature mitigates uncertainty in the crowdsourced delivery fleet and reduces fulfillment times and unit delivery costs. We also find evidence suggesting that the impact of tipping on driver behavior is geography‐contingent, with tipping having unexpectedly detrimental effects in high population density areas relative to low‐density areas. We conclude by making a series of theoretical propositions and managerial implications about designing technology to facilitate crowdsourced delivery.

Retail firms now offer same-day delivery via hybrid fleets that augment a privately owned delivery fleet with crowdsourced assets. As research on crowdsourced delivery continues to grow, it has implicitly assumed deliveries being conducted with an entirely crowdsourced fleet. In this study, we adopt a sociotechnical systems perspective to consider the phenomenon of combining privately owned delivery vehicles with crowdsourced assets into a hybrid fleet. In this exploratory effort, we examine how elements of the hybrid delivery system, namely, driver autonomy, compensation, fleet size, fleet mix, and demand intensity affect cost and service in last mile delivery. Using a multimethod simulation combining agent-based and discrete event techniques with home delivery data from a major US retail pharmacy, we show how the emergent outcomes of this hybrid delivery system are a consequence of the constituent elements' interdependence. Our experiments suggest a convex relationship between crowdsourced driver compensation and cost performance, such that low and high compensation amounts may actually increase unit delivery costs relative to a median compensation level, and a nonlinear negative relationship between compensation and fulfillment time. We find that these effects are moderated by fleet design (in terms of size and vehicle type mix) and order arrival rate intensity.

Integrity is considered an important corporate value. Yet recent global events have highlighted the challenges firms face at living up to their stated values, especially when extended supply chain partners are involved. The concept of Supply Chain Integrity (SCI) can help firms shift focus beyond internal corporate integrity, toward supply chain integrity. Researchers and managers will benefit from an understanding of the SCI concept toward implementing SCI to better align supply chain partners with stated corporate values. This research fully develops and empirically grounds the firm-level, inter-firm-oriented SCI concept. The thematic analysis of six firms' archival and website content elaborated empirical descriptions of SCI themes and enabled the development of a process model for SCI, presenting a novel view of the underlying process by which firms can assess, develop, and maintain SCI across their supply chains. We propose the SCI model as an evolutionary process to improve a firm's supply chain sustainability, rather than a dichotomous end state where firms either "have" integrity or they don't. The SCI model could be used as a tool to help leaders create necessary change to better align values and supporting statements with culture, while influencing and affecting stakeholders across the supply chain. This is particularly important in today's world, where business leaders must consider all stakeholders and address important stakeholder-driven issues such as supply chain sustainability, resilience, and security, which are now at the forefront in the ever-changing environment.

Over the past several decades, the disciplines of marketing and logistics grew apart from their common historical origins as marketing became more behavioral and more quantitative, while logistics leaned toward a more operational orientation. We argue in this editorial that social and technological changes in the past 20 years, coupled with the effects of the COVID pandemic, have created the conditions for the two disciplines to reconnect. We propose that scholars and practitioners consider a consumer‐centric approach to supply chain management. Such an approach advocates that the entire supply chain should focus on consumer experience rather than mere customer service and that experiences might include issues such as last‐mile delivery, supply chain visibility, and consumer values. We also introduce the papers appearing in this issue of the journal.

The rise of e‐commerce over the past 20 years has created an increased need for responsive omnichannel distribution to meet the last mile challenge. Some companies are experimenting with the use of the sharing economy business model to augment distribution strategies. The use of so‐called “Crowdsourced Logistics” ( CSL ) is becoming more prevalent in practice, but the role in logistics strategy of this new phenomenon has not been thoroughly investigated and understood. Using a contingency theory lens, this research contributes a nascent understanding of how CSL performs in terms of logistics effectiveness by simulating same‐day delivery services from a distribution center to 1,000 customer locations throughout New York City under dynamic market conditions and by comparing the results to those of a traditional dedicated fleet of delivery drivers. The findings are analyzed to suggest how firms may find strategic benefit using CSL . An agenda for future research is provided to explore these strategic implications and to deepen knowledge about the CSL phenomenon.

As stakeholders continue to increasingly hold firms accountable for environmental and social performance in their supply chains, the importance of understanding how firms can be more sustainable becomes more prescient. Based on the underlying premise of stakeholder theory that business and ethics decisions are intertwined, the current research introduces the concept of supply chain integrity (SCI) to explore how the interdependence of business and ethics decisions can lead to improvements in sustainable supply chain management (SSCM) practices. Exploratory analysis employing secondary data sources in an elastic net (EN) logistic regression provides support for the proposed construct, by providing preliminary empirical evidence that SCI , measured through two subdimensions of structural and moral SCI, can be linked to firm sustainability. The research contributes to the supply chain management literature by: (1) introducing the concept of SCI; (2) performing an exploratory econometric analysis to provide initial validity of the SCI construct; and (3) providing a research agenda to guide further research on the concept of SCI and its role in SSCM.