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Although the impact of carbon emissions regulations is evident to upstream automakers, their influence on downstream B2C car-sharing platforms remains unclear. This article reveals the influence of carbon emission regulations on the performance of supply chain members. In particular, we focused on the decision of B2C car-sharing platforms.

We develop a three-stage dynamic game model consisting of an automaker, a B2C car-sharing platform and consumers.

The carbon emission cap has a critical threshold. Above this threshold, the regulation is ineffective for the platform’s operating model. Below it, the regulation affects the platform, moderated by customers' green awareness. The threshold initially decreases (weakly) and then increases in awareness. Effective caps reduce profits for the manufacturer, B2C car-sharing platform and supply chain, while ineffective caps see higher profits with increased awareness.

Firstly, this paper explores the impact of carbon emission caps on the operational strategies of B2C car-sharing platforms within the sharing economy, complementing existing research. Secondly, it identifies conditions where stricter caps prompt B2C car-sharing platforms to adjust their operational models and offers fresh insights for managers and departments responsible for carbon emission policy formulation. Thirdly, the study uncovers how carbon emission caps affect the performance of supply chain members, providing crucial managerial insights for sustainable operations.

The dominance of road transport, both on passenger and freight movements, has reached alarming levels in what concerns their negative environmental impacts as well as societal and economic costs. To reverse this trend, a technology-driven approach and a behavioral change attitude need to be pursued. Promising results have been reported in Europe in the reduction of vehicle ownership, due to the introduction of an alternative transport mode known as car sharing. This work evaluates the contribution of car sharing to sustainable transport, based both in a technological shift and a potential behavioral change.

The state of the art on car sharing and policies presents the effects of these systems and how they have been promoted. As those effects can vary according to the geographical area, the users profile, and service characteristics, a worldwide analysis on car sharing systems covering more than 400 cities was performed. Average service indicators were quantified and characterization variables were accounted to those cities’ urban areas. Considering those normalized values, the authors performed an analysis of the car sharing system in Lisbon (Portugal). An initial assessment was made to estimate its current energy and environmental impacts. This outcome was then compared with the environmental and economic effects of using alternative vehicle technologies in car sharing. The results obtained enable a discussion of the more important variables for the success of the system and, consequently, to choose what policy instruments can help car sharing to succeed.

The results of the existing car sharing schemes reveal the positive contribution of car sharing to fill a “mobility gap” in sustainable transport. It works as a complement to other sustainable transport options and it impacts positively both society and car-sharers in terms of mobility costs, environmental, and energy implications. These results are more significant if a technology shift to electric mobility is promoted. Within the case study in Lisbon, the adoption of electric mobility would allow decreases up to 47% and 65% in energy consumption and CO₂ emissions, respectively. Moreover, the present value economic analysis revealed that, these systems will only be economically viable after approximately 7 years. A sensitivity analysis to the economic model was performed showing that the variables having higher influence were cost-related variables (reducing the break-even timeframe from 36% to 57%), such as vehicle purchase cost, insurance, maintenance and tax costs, and fuel cost.

Car sharing systems generally present social benefits to society as it leads to the reduction of car ownership, with all the positive effects that has on a lower demand for parking space, less congestion, reduced local pollutants and emissions. If the technology used by car sharing vehicles shifts from conventional to another type of technology, the effects both for society and car sharers are even more appealing from a social point of view. In the particular case study approached in the chapter, given the small scale of the car sharing network and low usage patterns, the local results have a low social impact at the city scale. A larger promotion of the system either with a more aggressive marketing campaign targeting specific population niches (e.g., environmentally conscious people), larger vehicle and parking availability, or better integration with the city’s public transport system could foster the deployment of the system, similarly to other cities.

Overall, the results obtained from this research work quantify the contribution of car sharing to sustainable transport and highlights the positive effects of promoting a technological shift. These facts reinforce the need for public policies to support the integration of car sharing within the city’s solutions to promote a more sustainable mobility. The successful deployment of car sharing systems can be influenced by policies targeting features such as allocation of parking, the fees and complementarity with public transport, signage and markings, and marketing of social and environmental benefits.

This chapter focuses on strategies to initiate a shift in mobility behaviour away from private cars towards a combination of more environmentally friendly transport modes including public transport, ride- and car sharing or even completely carbon-free modes like walking and cycling. The requirement for such a shift is that people must be able to actually choose between different travelling options and combine them within an intermodal mobility network. Here, shared mobility has a considerable potential to fill the gap between public and individual transport options.

This chapter summarises results from different studies on shared mobility from the providers’, the users’ and the political perspective. The user’s perspective is based on an empirical study comparing car sharers’, car drivers’ and public transport users’ attitudes and mobility patterns.

The empirical findings from the case study have shown that shuttle trips by car in general, and to the train station in particular, are an important field of action for improving the environmental impact of intermodal trips. The study has also shown that car sharing enables people to live without a private car by using different transport modes for different purposes. As the majority of car sharers report needing a car only one to three times a month, they have a very small carbon footprint compared to the average car owner.

Mobility patterns are determined by local transport options as well as by personal routines. Hence, current changes due to new shared mobility options seem to have a considerable direct impact on how people organise their daily lives on the one hand and an indirect impact on their living costs on the other hand, since private cars have an important share of private household costs.

From an environmental perspective, any incentives to encourage people to choose alternative forms of transport over their private cars would seem to be particularly effective. Thus, understanding the behaviour and needs of multi- and intermodal travellers is an important step towards sustainable mobility. Acknowledging that most travellers still need a car every now and then, car sharing is an essential addition to public transport systems, supporting both public transport use and carbon-free mobility like walking and cycling.

Presently, existing electric car sharing platforms are based on a centralized architecture which are faced with inadequate trust and pricing issues as these platforms requires an intermediary to maintain users’ data and handle transactions between participants. Therefore, this article aims to develop a decentralized peer-to-peer electric car sharing prototype framework that offers trustable and cost transparency.

This study employs a systematic review and data were collected from the literature and existing technical report documents after which content analysis is carried out to identify current problems and state-of-the-art electric car sharing. A use case scenario was then presented to preliminarily validate and show how the developed prototype framework addresses the trust-lessness in electric car sharing via distributed ledger technologies (DLTs).

Findings from this study present a use case scenario that depicts how businesses can design and implement a distributed peer-to-peer electric car sharing platforms based on IOTA technology, smart contracts and IOTA eWallet. Main findings from this study unlock the tremendous potential of DLT to foster sustainable road transportation. By employing a token-based approach this study enables electric car sharing that promotes sustainable road transportation.

Practically the developed decentralized prototype framework provides improved cost transparency and fairness guarantees as it is not based on a centralized price management system. The DLT based decentralized prototype framework aids to orchestrate the incentivize monetization and rewarding mechanisms among participants that share their electric cars enabling them to collaborate towards lessening CO₂ emissions.

The findings advocate that electric vehicle sharing has become an essential component of sustainable road transportation by increasing electric car utilization and decreasing the number of vehicles on the road.

The key novelty of the article is introducing a decentralized prototype framework to be employed to develop an electric car sharing solution without a central control or governance, which improves cost transparency. As compared to prior centralized platforms, the prototype framework employs IOTA technology smart contracts and IOTA eWallet to improve mobility related services.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the actual demand on formal car-sharing scheme in Saudi Arabia as a means of public modes of transport in order to assess the potential future of this mode in Saudi Arabia as a policy measure.

In this context, this paper investigates the potential feasibility of introducing formal car-sharing scheme as a means of public modes of transport in Tabuk city. Investigation of the characteristics of trip makers, which impact on the decision of selecting the currently available informal car-sharing as a mode of travel, is presented. The paper investigates the factors which affect the decisions of car-sharing in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia using the household survey data. Discrete choice modelling techniques have been adopted in this research to investigate behaviour and attitudes to car-sharing and the binary logit model has been utilised.

From the results, in the case of Tabuk, the main factor in selection of the transport mode is the social role, and specifically the role inside the family. Results showed that about 49 per cent of total respondents drive to work, while about 20 per cent reported that they use car-sharing. About 8 per cent of respondents reported that they use a private driver, while other 8 per cent reported that they use a contracted driver.

Investigation of the potential of introducing formal car-sharing scheme in Saudi Arabia as a means of public modes of transport in Saudi Arabia which is a more sustainable mode of transport.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the characteristics of closed car-sharing services and present the relevant factors to provide reasonable service locations. Car-sharing service locations have been arranged to allow customers to easily access locations. However, the particular car-sharing service in this study, enforced through an agreement between residents of the House of Commons, is operated as a closed service, limited to public housing residents. This closed car-sharing service in the House of Commons differs from typical services in that, after use, the users return the vehicle to the same parking location. In addition, determination of the general car-sharing locations is based on the profits of the service operator. The service can be stopped as there are a number of other alternatives for mobility. However, if the closed car-sharing service in the House of Commons is canceled, there is no other alternative for existing users. Therefore, the site selection for the initial introduction of the House of Commons in a closed car-sharing service is a very important issue.

This study uses nine months of data from 39 complexes for location analysis for public housing residents in urban areas. The LH Happy Carsharing is a closed private service, used by people residing within approximately 50 rental LH-apartment complexes. As closed car sharing is unfavorable in comparison to other car-sharing services, it is important to demonstrate that the service can succeed in securing a sufficient amount of users. To analyze the viability and usage of the service, the authors have considered ten potential variables.

On the basis of the regression analysis result, the adopted significant variables are the number of households, the percentage of residents in the 40’s age group and the number of households with registered vehicles.

In general, for car-sharing research, specific user groups are not generally identified. However, LH Happy Carsharing is specifically targeted to residents in rental apartments. The LH Happy Carsharing is a private service, used by people residing within approximately 50 rental LH Apartment complexes. Since closed carsharing is unfavorable in comparison to other carsharing services, it is important to demonstrate that the service can succeed in securing a sufficient amount of users. Therefore, this study aims to analyze the characteristics of private carsharing and present the relevant factors to provide reasonable service locations.

The 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.

The 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.

The 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.

With 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.

Authors 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.

Recently, the sharing economy has attracted considerable attention. This emerging paradigm is driven by powerful technological forces and has the potential to change the way consumers access very important markets such as the car market. Indeed, access-based consumption may attract more participants as it enables consumers’ freedom of lifestyle and more flexible identity projects. The empirical literature has so far paid very little attention to car sharing services; when it has, it has focussed mainly on people who are already using them. The purpose of this paper is to consider the drivers behind the adoption intention of car sharing services.

A large multinational survey is carried out in three European capitals: London, Madrid and Paris. Using quota sampling, 2,159 licensed car drivers are recruited through the online panel of TNS Sofres. The sample is representative of the population of licensed car drivers in each city. The questionnaire is developed using established scales from previous research. An OLS regression analysis is performed to test our hypotheses, with a likelihood of choosing a car sharing option as the dependent variable.

The study demonstrates that knowledge, environmentalism, possession-self link and involvement with cars are important determinants of consumer behaviour in the car sharing services market. In addition, the user demographics suggest a target market of younger, predominantly male and urban customers. The empirical findings are consistent across the three capital cities, implying that providers can market their car sharing services in a similar manner.

As important determinants of consumer behaviour in the car sharing services market are underlined, several managerial implications arise from the study. Car sharing providers should promote awareness to help people not only to expand their experience with the service but also to be informed about the potential environmental benefits. Further, a stronger possession-self link in the automotive context is suggestive of a greater willingness to use car sharing systems. Managers should also take into account that it is much more difficult to engage individuals in car sharing services who are highly involved with car, than those who express very little attachment to the product. As people under 45 years old are far more likely to use these services, this generation effect is progressively moving the frontiers of the car retailing sector to a broader mobility service sector.

The foremost contribution of this paper is to demonstrate empirically how consumer intention to use car sharing is driven. To do so, the study addresses the general population of car drivers, interviewing users of the service as well as non-users.

Marketing, entrepreneurship, operations management, and transportation/logistics.

The case is suitable for junior, senior undergraduate and first-year graduate business classes. It can be used entirely in business classes in marketing, entrepreneurship, operations management, and transportation/logistics, and parts of it can be used for discussions in classes related to emerging economies/markets, environmental management, sustainability, and technology management.

The case builds on the expansion plan considered by a young software company, called Hangzhou Omnipay located in the city of Hangzhou, China. Mr Chao, Vice President (VP) of Omnipay, is the main character of the case. He was aware of the current car-sharing industry leader – Zipcar headquartered in Boston and also identified multiple stakeholders in the city for decision making. By collaborating with a global student project team, Mr Chao collected a great deal of information and data. This teaching case provides students and educators ample opportunities to examine, from a multitude of aspects, the viability of a car-sharing service in Hangzhou.

The central goal is to help students gain a comprehensive understanding of the role of car-sharing service in a country's development in sustainability, socio-economy, environmental commitment, and new urban life style, as well as in a technological company's active pursuit of business expansion opportunity. In addition, students will not only understand the social, cultural, technological and strategic perspectives of car-sharing service implementation, but also develop and enhance analytic skills needed to conduct fundamental cost analysis, determine a base-line pricing scheme, and service location network design.

Teaching notes are available, please contact your librarian for access.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the motivational factors that help shape user perceptions of and attitudes toward car-sharing services and develop a research model that integrates these factors with the technology acceptance model to explicate car sharing’s adoption pattern.

An online survey was administered to examine the role of proposed motivational factors for the adoption of wearable healthcare devices. Confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling were conducted on collected data (n=638) to demonstrate the reliability and validity of the measurement and structural model.

Perceived reliability, compatibility, and enjoyment of car-sharing services as well as users’ innovative tendencies are positively associated with usage intention. However, users’ privacy concern and perceived cost of using the services are found to have no significant effects on the adoption of the services.

While the recent advent of mobile communication devices and services has increased access to social sharing-based platform services such as car sharing, this study provides a research framework that helps to understand how various psychological factors contribute to the adoption of a social-sharing service.