Promoting User Participation of Shared Mobility in the Sharing Economy: Evidence from Chinese Bike Sharing Services

Liguo Lou,Sung-Byung Yang,Lin Li,Joon Koh

doi:10.3390/su13031533

Liguo Lou, Sung-Byung Yang + Show 2 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/su13031533

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Abstract

User participation plays a critical role in the business success of shared mobility services. This study classifies user participation behavior into two different types (in- and extra-role participations), integrates the motivation–opportunity–ability (MOA) model and social exchange theory (SET) to identify key antecedents, and empirically examines the influences of user–user, user–provider, and user–service interaction-related factors on user participation in the context of bike sharing services. The results of structural equation model analysis with 438 bike sharing service users in China reveal that altruism, rewards, and user knowledge enhance both in- and extra-role participations, whereas perceived ease of use promotes only user in-role participation, and both user satisfaction and commitment increase only user extra-role participation. Rewards are also found to promote user satisfaction, ultimately increasing user commitment. This study contributes to the body of knowledge on value co-creation and customer cooperation behavior in the sharing economy and provides practical implications to both managers of bike sharing services and policymakers for urban transportation and ICT-enabled sustainable development.

Highlights

To empirically examine these relationships, this study focuses on the commercial bike sharing services in China as this industry has seen a rise, fall, and resurgence in the span of only a few years, during which the two types of user participation play critical roles in determining business performance
In line with bike sharing users who play the role of “partial employee”, this study suggests that user satisfaction and user commitment have the potential to increase user participation from the “user as a value co-creator” perspective [19,20]
Following Fornell and Larcker [63], this study compared the square root of average variance extracted (AVE) for each construct with the inter-construct correlation estimates to check discriminant validity

Summary

Introduction

With the COVID-19 pandemic, platform- or access-based business models have dramatically changed people’s lives, accelerating the sharing economy. The sharing economy is defined as a scalable socio-economic system based on technology-enabled platforms that provide users with temporary access to tangible and intangible resources that can be crowdsourced [3]. These emerging business models consist of numerous typologies that challenge conventional ownership-based businesses, ushering in changes to various aspects of people’s everyday lives such as transportation, financial and banking, accommodation, tourism, and entertainment industries

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