Crowdshipping, if the crowd shows up
Crowdshipping and crowdsourced delivery appear on 10 recent papers in the operations research journals, with 4 in the last quarter against about 2 per quarter before. The models route parcels through ordinary travellers who happen to be going the same way. Do enough people accept such tasks, and at what pay, for the routes to work?
What prompted this
Since October 2025, 10 papers carry a crowdshipping, crowdsourced-delivery or crowd-logistics keyword (9 in operations research journals): "crowdshipping" on 6, "crowdsourced delivery" on 4. Four of them were published in July–September 2026 against about 2 per quarter earlier.
Questions
- In the platforms that actually run crowdshipping, what share of offered tasks are accepted, by whom, and at what compensation relative to professional couriers?
- Do the routing models' assumptions about the supply of occasional drivers match observed acceptance rates, and how much of the modelled savings survive when they do not?
- Does crowdshipping reduce vehicle kilometres, or add detours by drivers who were not going there anyway?
Data that could help
Task offer and acceptance logs from a crowdshipping platform, driver surveys, and GPS traces of accepted deliveries.
Next step
Obtain acceptance and detour data from one crowdshipping platform and recompute a published model's savings with the observed acceptance rates.