Pricing Strategies Of Car-Sharing Manufacturer Considering Service Level

With the rapid development of the sharing economy,people’s ideas have changed from holding to using.The most common are shared transportation(shared bicycles,shared cars,etc.).more and more auto manufacturers are simultaneously offering consumers cars for sales and for sharing,but consumers have lower acceptance of sharing cars.The investigation found that the main reason was that consumers were waiting too long to choose a sharing car,which led to the loss of many potential consumers of sharing cars.In this paper,by introducing the time cost for consumers to choose transportation,it provides suggestions for car manufacturers to consider the sharing mode,and at the same time enriches the literature research of previous scholars by considering the time cost of consumers.First of all,we found that the long time for consumers to find a car is because the manufacturer’s investment in sharing cars is low,and the number of outlets is small.The time for consumers to find a car is related to the actual amount of car manufacturers’ sharing cars.Because a sharing car can serve different consumers at different times,consumers only need to provide a certain percentage of market demand to meet market demand.However,in the case of inadequate access to information,manufacturers actually provide a ratio that is higher or lower than the ratio that meets market demand.At this time,we take the ratio actually provided by the manufacturer as the service level provided by the car manufacturer.Therefore,when the market demand is certain,the service level will affect the number of sharing cars put on the market and thus affect the time for consumers to find a car.This study optimizes the modelling and analysis of decision-making issues for automakers to join the sharing mode,and gives the analysis of the manufacturer’s adoption of the sharing mode and the impact of service levels on prices decisions.The study found:The sales price of cars is affected by the consumer’s unit time valuation and the salvage value after a period of use.The appropriate operating mode for manufacturers is affected by the level of service they can provide.We found that when the service level of the sharing mode provided by the automaker is below a certain threshold,the sharing mode is not profitable,so the automaker cannot introduce the sharing mode at this time.When the service level is in a certain threshold range,the sharing mode starts to be profitable.And because the service level is still lower than another higher threshold,the sales mode is still profitable.At this time,the higher the service level,the more the sharing mode cannibalize the sales mode,so car manufacturers can adopt a hybrid mode.When the service level is higher than a higher threshold,the sharing mode will completely cannibalize the sales mode;the sales mode is no longer profitable.Automakers should abandon the sales mode and only maintain the sharing mode.In addition,we also found that when the service level is high,lowering the sales price cannot retain the loss of consumers.Instead,the price should be increased to prevent the sales mode from causing greater losses.In order to further analyze the impact of different travel time costs on manufacturers’ optimal pricing.We extended the model to refine the utility function of consumers choosing public transportation.However,due to the complexity of the model,we made the service level fixed and used the heterogeneity of consumers in time value to divide the market.The use of time value to divide the market can reflect the degree of importance consumers attach to time on the one hand,and the price sensitivity of consumers on the other hand.Through analysis,we mainly studied the impact of consumers ’time difference between public car search time and sharing car search time on manufacturers’ decisions.The study found: the longer the average travel time for consumers,the lower the optimal pricing for sharing cars.When the waiting time for consumers to choose a sharing car is closer to that of public transportation,the price of sharing cars should be lower.At the same time,we investigated the effect of two waiting times on the optimal output of the manufacturer.We found that manufacturers should increase the number of shared car launches only when certain conditions are met.This condition is easier to meet when consumers are looking for a car in public transportation that is much longer than the car sharing time.Through numerical analysis,we found that when consumers choose public transportation to find a car longer than the sharing car,the manufacturer needs to work hard to increase the difference between the sharing car and public transportation,which is to reduce the time to find a sharing car Although the total profit will be reduced in the short term,in the long run,the total profit will continue to increase and be much higher than the total profit without effort.