John BOWEN, Central Washington University, United States
Amazon is one of the largest of the multi-sided marketplaces (Hänninen, Mitronen, Kwan 2019), a group that also includes Alibaba, JD.com, Rakuten, eBay, and MercadoLibre. Since it was formed in 2016, Amazon Air has expanded rapidly across the US (Schwieterman and Walls, 2020) and more recently in other markets. Amazon Air was created partly to reduce Amazon's dependence on FedEx and UPS. In this paper, Amazon Air's network is contrasted to the domestic networks of FedEx Express and UPS Airlines. The paper draws on 12 months of Amazon Air operations data and employs network analysis as in earlier studies of the integrators (Bombelli, Santos and Tavasszy 2020; Malighetti et al, 2019a; Malighetti et al, 2019b). Amazon Air has a lower network density than the other two airlines and is more strongly related to Amazon's distribution centers. Like UPS and FedEx, Amazon has placed its main hub at a location in the central US: first Wilmington, Ohio and more recently Cincinnati. The acceleration of online retail trade since the onset of the COVID19 pandemic may encourage other digitally native or incumbent retail firms to develop their own air distribution networks. The criteria that distinguish Amazon Air's key hubs are identified and then those criteria are applied to all public US airports to detect others that might be suitable for incorporation into a retail distribution air network. Implications for other world regions are also assessed, including the recent development of Amazon Air services in Europe and Mecado Libre's Meli air cargo service in Latin America.
Mots clés : Amazon Air|multi-sided marketplaces|FedEx|UPS|network analysis
A103356JB