Three essays on time window assortment design for grocery home delivery

Waßmuth, Katrin

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URN:	urn:nbn:de:bsz:180-madoc-716859
Dokumenttyp:	Dissertation
Erscheinungsjahr:	2026
Ort der Veröffentlichung:	Mannheim
Hochschule:	Universität Mannheim
Gutachter:	Fleischmann, Moritz
Datum der mündl. Prüfung:	2025
Sprache der Veröffentlichung:	Englisch
Einrichtung:	Fakultät für Betriebswirtschaftslehre > ABWL u. Logistik (Fleischmann 2009-)
Fachgebiet:	650 Management
Freie Schlagwörter (Englisch):	demand management , attended home delivery , e-grocery , time window assortment
Abstract:	In online grocery retailing, customers are usually offered a set of delivery time windows to choose from, a last-mile delivery concept commonly referred to as attended home delivery. From a service perspective, customers tend to prefer short time windows. Retailers, however, must fulfill orders efficiently despite the inherent complexity of planning time-constrained deliveries, which rather favors longer time windows. The design of delivery time windows therefore plays a crucial role in shaping both customer demand and operational efficiency. The growing body of literature on demand management in attended home delivery addresses this trade-off by optimizing the offering and pricing of delivery time windows. However, existing research has primarily focused on selecting an efficient subset of time windows from a given set within medium- and short-term planning horizons. The strategic design of these sets, referred to as time window assortments, remains largely underexplored. This dissertation addresses a novel planning problem: how to design time window assortments that account for customer preferences while maintaining delivery efficiency. Across three essays, we address this research gap, propose a modeling approach to analyze the problem, derive tractable analytical results and obtain numerical insights to examine key trade-offs, and discuss practical implications. The first essay provides a structured literature review of demand management in attended home delivery, covering strategic, tactical, and operational approaches such as pricing, availability control, and feasibility assessment. We synthesize insights across fields of application, highlight common modeling choices, and identify promising research gaps. The second essay investigates profit implications of different time window assortments. We develop an evaluation model based on continuous approximation to assess metrics like delivery cost and capacity and examine how the number, length, and overlap of time windows affect performance. The results offer guidance for aligning operations strategy with relevant market conditions to make grocery delivery services economically viable. The third essay incorporates stochasticity in customer choice behavior across the time window assortment to further analyze the effects of overlapping time windows. We derive optimal demand allocations, identify ex-post conditions under which overlapping time windows reduce delivery costs, and apply Monte Carlo estimation to test these conditions at the decision-making level. Together, these essays provide a novel perspective on time window assortment design as a strategic lever in attended home delivery. Our findings offer theoretical insights and actionable guidance for online grocery retailers seeking to align customer satisfaction with efficient last-mile operations.