Sustaining and sharing: Optimal decisions in product-sharing platforms with green services

Abstract

While some researchers consider the traditional product-sharing model in which the platform only focuses on its profits, this study considers a green-sharing mode, where the platform focuses on its profits and provides green services to consumers. We analyze the optimization problems on the pricing scheme under the traditional mode and on the pricing scheme and effort for offering green services under the green mode. We investigate how the green service implementation affects stakeholders and find that providers are always better off under the green mode. When consumers prefer the product-sharing model, the green mode can generate higher profits given that 1) the lower difference and larger cost coefficient or 2) the higher difference and smaller cost coefficient, and the traditional mode increases consumer surplus if the difference is sufficiently high. When consumers prefer the baseline model, whether the green mode brings higher profits depends on the relationship between the sensitivity degree of consumers and discount ratio, and consumers are better off under the traditional mode if the difference and discount ratio are higher. Furthermore, we establish a contract in which all stakeholders are better off under the green mode when consumers have green preferences.

Keywords:

• Product sharing
• mode choice
• green services
• pricing scheme

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the editor-in-chief, the anonymous associate editor, and the two anonymous reviewers for their very insightful comments and suggestions that have substantially improved this article.

Data availability statement

Data sharing not applicable—no new data generated.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Funding

This work was supported by the Ministry of Education in China Project of Humanities and Social Sciences under Grant 22YJC630009, Henan Soft Science Research Project under Grant 222400410164, Project of Henan Provincial Social Science Circles Federation under Grant SKL-2022-2393, and Philosophy and Social Science Planning Project of Henan under Grant 2022CJJ132.