The benefit of information sharing in a logistics outsourcing context

The goal of this article is to examine the value of information sharing in outsourcing of logistics activities. Our examination is in the context of a fairly complex network in which location and capacity of carriers are considered. The current research also examines the moderating effect of network settings on the benefit of information sharing. A core component of our methodology is use of computational experiments to provide a variety of logistics network conditions under which we investigate information sharing value. The investigation involves comparing two strategies, namely full and no information sharing. Underlying the experiments are procedures to optimise the network under each strategy. The procedures are based on exact methods that combine integer linear programming with exhaustive enumeration. To gauge the robustness of the insights, we applied formal analysis of variance techniques to the data from the numerical experiments. The obtained insights are helpful to managers for selecting appropriate logistics service providers and level of information exchange.