Research

Abstract: As an environmentally friendly and convenient transport mode, bike-sharing has been fast developed in major cities around the world. More bike-sharing firms have been formed and intensified market competition. The government has stipulated regulations to intervene in bike-sharing firm operations and to maintain orderly competition. This paper establishes an integrated economic model to examine duopoly bike-sharing firm competition in both prices and the number of deployed bikes. Specifically, more deployed bikes in the urban area reduce the time cost for the users to find an available bike (i.e., the search cost), but they can also impose a negative social externality on the urban management. Two government policies to control the number of deployed bikes have been examined and benchmarked. One is the limit on the total number of the deployed bikes (i.e., the supply-side regulation), and the other is the restriction to allow the users to only register or use certain firms’ services (i.e., the demand-side regulation of single-homing). Our model is also further calibrated by using the bike-sharing market data of Beijing for policy implications. It is found that, when the negative social externality of bike deployment is sufficiently small, the government should allow users’ multi-homing (i.e., registration on both firms’ platforms). However, when the negative social externality is high, the government should strictly control the number of bikes through both the supply-side and demand-side restrictions. Our analyses also suggest that it is never socially optimal to only adopt the demand-side restriction (i.e., forcing the single-homing). That is, the supply-side policy is more socially preferred to correct the negative social externality in most cases. When two bike-sharing firms offer quite heterogeneous services (i.e., low service substitutability), it is more socially optimal to only implement the supply-side policy. 

Abstract: This paper examines creators’ contributions and the incentive effects of users’ feedback, including upvoting, sharing, commenting, following, viewing comments, and clicking on the creators’ homepage. We build a negative binomial and ordinary least squares (OLS) regression model using data from a Chinese music streaming company NetEase Cloud Music. Results show that creators’ number of content contributions is positively affected by the number of users’ commenting, viewing comments, sharing, and clicking on homepage behaviors. On the other hand, users’ upvotes and sharing behaviors can significantly influence the quality of content published by creators. Moreover, we find that the intensity level of creators has moderate effects on such influence. These findings help the researchers better understand creators’ behaviors and community managers to build user-generated content (UGC) communities.

Abstract: This study aims to analyze the cooperation and competition between electric vehicle firms on the decision of the charging station investment considering its network effect. The strategies of electric-vehicle firms include collaborating on the building charging station and independently investing in charging stations. Based on different competition cases and electric-vehicle firms' strategies, this study examines the optimal strategy for firms and the influence of the network effect of charging stations on firms' decisions. This study provides important managerial implications that can be utilized as strategic guidance for electric-vehicle firms to gain profits and for government to promote electric vehicles deployment.

Abstract: Carpooling is widely recognized as a sustainable transportation option for alleviating city congestion and reducing global warming. Many initiatives have been introduced worldwide by governments and industries to promote carpooling usage. In France, local governments have introduced carpooling subsidy policies since 2019 to encourage traveling by carpooling. We estimate the effect of local carpooling subsidies on carpooling usage using a difference-in-differences design that exploits variation across French “Communautés de Communes” (i.e. local city community) in both the subsidy amount and the timing of subsidy policy start. We find that implementing the carpooling subsidy increases its usage by around 60% and that a 1-euro increase in carpooling subsidy will lead to a 58.8% increase in carpooling ridership. This average effect masks considerable heterogeneity, with subsidy increasing ridership more in larger cities and the effect being negligible for the smallest cities.