Pricing third-party logistics services: Integrating insights from the logistics and industrial services literature

Abstract

As the logistics services outsourced by companies increase in scope and complexity, the challenge of designing appropriate contracts grows. Here, the price model, which determines the remuneration, takes a central position. In practice, however, the agreed-upon contracts often fail to govern the relationship and set wrong or misleading incentives for either or both of the involved parties. In order to provide a conceptual basis and to identify promising avenues for future research in the increasingly important field of pricing third-party logistics services, this article provides a comprehensive review of the existing literature on logistics and industrial service pricing using a refined version of the established Industrial Marketing and Purchasing (IMP) group relationship management framework.