Pricing and coordination strategies for bike-sharing supply chain based on Stackelberg game

Abstract

With the development in recent years, bike-sharing projects have gradually become mature and have a huge market scale. Accurate pricing and appropriate launching strategies are essential for the bike-sharing platforms to gain a foothold in the market. This article considers the pricing and the lunching strategies in the centralized model and the decentralized model, respectively. The manufacturer, as the game leader, first sets the wholesale price, then the platform, as the game follower, decides the rental price to the user every time they use bike sharing and the quantity of launching bike sharing. Furthermore, with the centralized supply chain as a benchmark, the pricing and launching strategies of the proposed model are analyzed. The results show that bike sharing rental price, wholesale price, quantity, and profit of supply chain system are positively correlated with market demand, and negatively correlated with price sensitivity. The efficiency of the decentralized supply chain system is relatively low due to the double marginalization effect. Finally, we design a revenue sharing contract to coordinate the supply chain and promote a win-win situation in the supply chain.