A Novel Business Model for Electric Car Sharing

Abstract

Transportation sharing in goods (bike sharing) and services (ride sharing) has been one of the most active sectors of the rising sharing economy. Such a mobile platform, based on a business model, seeks supplies in vehicles for their demands at matched times and rental locations. While its improved efficiency makes vehicle sharing popular over the traditional taxi services, it has attracted more competitors that have created redundancies in suppliers, which creates a new challenge in social efficiency. The problem also becomes for car sharing and will be intensified by the increased competition among all operators. In this work, we present a business solution by setting up a joint venture to provide shared resources as a base for different competitors to operate on. These competitors share the cost of the joint venture and then provide their own differentiated service to their customers through their own mobile apps. We formulate the number of users in the car sharing market as a S-shape function with respect to time and discretize the time into infinite rounds. In each round, we study this business model by formulating it as a two-stage Stackelberg game and apply the backward induction to analyze the equilibria of the leader and the followers in each round. Our results on the equilibria can forecast the car sharing market reasonably and avoid the redundancies in suppliers effectively. We also conduct numerical computation to visualize our theoretical results about the influence of joint venture decisions in the end.

This research was partially supported by the National Nature Science Foundation of China (No. 11871366, 61761146005, 61632017, 61803279).