ABSTRACT
Service platform has developed rapidly in car-sharing, consumers often buy or own cars but not fully utilize and share them. Since the coronavirus pandemic has affected sales and people's attitudes towards car-sharing, which brought both opportunities and challenges to the platform and changed the operating mode of manufacturers, some traditional manufacturers have motivated to cooperate with third-party platform. In this paper, we develop an analytical framework to examine the pricing decisions and optimal mode selection of manufacturer under the COVID-19 epidemic. Considering the supply chain consists of a manufacturer and a third-party sharing platform. We analyze three scenarios including no sharing, customers-to-customers, and mixed sharing, then employ a game theoretic approach to get equilibrium solutions and analytically derive the optimal mode choice. Our analysis shows that when the operation and maintenance cost is low, manufacturer will join the third-party platform, and the sharing price increase in operation and maintenance cost, while the selling price decrease in operation and maintenance cost. When the value perception factor less than the threshold, the manufacturer will retain sales channel, and the selling demand decrease in value perception factor in the growing market, the sharing demand has the same trend, vice versa. Furthermore, we find that if the operation and maintenance cost is low and value perception factor is high, mixed sharing is the best choice for the manufacturer, while the manufacturer will choose no car-sharing when the value perception factor is relatively low.
ABSTRACT
PurposeThe car-sharing market has entered the mature stage, and consumers' demand shows a diversified increasing trend. This paper considers two modes of operation and two pricing strategies, which are business-to-consumer and consumer-to-consumer modes, market pricing and platform pricing. Under these conditions, the platform's revenue-sharing ratio will be different. The purpose of this paper is to explore this research question, and seeks an optimal pricing mechanism that can achieve a win–win situation between platform and automobile manufacturer in the two market modes.Design/methodology/approachThe authors design different profit functions for platform under the two contexts. Of course, the platform's function is constrained to the manufacturer's function. By introducing a revenue-sharing contract a Stackelberg game model dominated by the platform is established and the equilibrium solutions under the two pricing models are derived.FindingsThe study found that even if only market pricing is executed, the scale of the car-sharing market will continue to expand. As the car-sharing market becomes more saturated, platform pricing is better for the automobile manufacturer;in most cases, the platform prefers platform pricing, but when the number of private cars is relatively small, if the cost of car operation and maintenance for the automobile manufacturer is lower or the revenue-sharing ratio of private cars is high, then market pricing will be more favorable to the platform.Practical implicationsWith the cross-border integration of car service platforms and the automobile manufacturing industry, the key to achieving win–win cooperation and sustainable development in the car-sharing market will converge on the question of how to design a suitable pricing mechanism and revenue-sharing method.Originality/valueAuthors have determined how a car-sharing platform achieves a win–win order pricing strategy with the manufacturer and private car owners, respectively. And authors combined the supply chain revenue-sharing contract with the car-sharing market to explore the application of the revenue-sharing contract in the sharing economy.