| Location decisions are important and complex considerations in all industrial activity. This dissertation is concerned with the impact of electronic commerce (EC) on the warehousing structures and the location of warehouses. It is recognized that warehousing structures are subject to continuous re-consideration within companies and there is no one structure that suits all situations. The main interest in this work is on capturing and modeling the warehouse location criteria.; In the scope of this study, the impact of EC on the warehousing structure and location decisions in a selected area of the US semiconductor industry is closely examined. The current location criteria important to the industry are found as a result of interviews with the company representatives and the current industry literature. The chosen methodological framework includes different types of logit models (the Multinomial Logit, the Nested Logit, and the Random Parameter Logit) of which the Nested Logit model performed the best. These models are then used to model the semiconductor location decisions in a chosen study area of Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, and Utah.; The modeling results suggest that within this study area, proximity to international cargo airports, proximity to technical universities, taxes, living costs, land costs, and quality of life are some of the preferred criteria considered by the semiconductor companies. It is then shown that the models, using these criteria, reasonably capture the existing location pattern in the study area. The results of this study are significant for the semiconductor industry where agglomeration economies (= where there are benefits from locating close to other similar companies) are widely recognized, as well as for state and city authorities that are faced with the increasing competition of the new semiconductor establishments. The results are potentially generalizable to other regional centers of semiconductors. |
