Rental Car Research Articles

Quantifying the Requirements to Scale a Carpooling Business

Carpooling is now seen as last big opportunity to grow a shared mobility as a service (MaaS) business ahead of the arrival of autonomous vehicles (AVs). We present the case that Waze’s altruistic vision of carpooling is insufficient to scale the business. Our transactional vision of the business, requiring market pay rates to drivers, creates little incentive for people to choose carpooling over solo commuting. We think that it will take a minimum of $4,000 in cost saving to motive a significant number of people to go carless. This implies that fares will have be reduced by an additional $1,583 a year to reach that level of cost savings. The way to recoup this is by negotiating referral credits (dollar or accounting) with related units offering last-mile ride-sharing, delivery, and weekend car rentals.

Utilizing Spatial Big Data platform in evaluating correlations between rental housing car sharing and public transportation

Car sharing service for public rental housing in Korea, Happy Car, has increased the mobility for the residents and used as transportation welfare in the era of sharing economy. However, the car sharing service operator for rental housing have needed to improve the services more efficiently and access easily to public transportation but have difficulties in geocoding, analyzing and geovisualizing the large volume of disaggregate data in the services. Therefore, it needs a correlation analysis between rental housing car sharing usage patterns and public transportation accessibility by processing this big volume of data. In this study, we used the sharing car’s GPS data in the 45 rental housing districts in Seoul Metropolitan Area and the transportation card transaction data and analyzed the correlation between car sharing service and the supply level of public transportation. To handle the large volume of spatial location data and the card data during the analysis, we used Spatial Big Data platform to process this spatially referenced Big Data in a parallel distributed way. From the spatial analysis, the level of public transportation supply doesn’t affect the use pattern of sharing car in the rental housing and low income rental housing district households showed the longest moving distance. In terms of analytical functions of the Spatial Big Data platform, spatial computation through the platform such as the buffering analysis used for the accessibility analysis of the public transportation was found to be efficient in repetitive spatial operations of the massive amount of data.

“Supersize me!” The effects of cognitive effort and goal frame on the persuasiveness of upsell offers

PurposeIn many industries, customers are offered the opportunity to revise their initial decision in return for a superior but more expensive service option, a selling technique that is typically referred to as upselling. Drawing on the research on customers’ service experience, cognitive effort, decision justification, and goal framing, the purpose of this paper is to conceptualize upselling as a two-stage decision process where the process of making the first decision (i.e. deciding on an initial service option) affects the final decision (i.e. the decision for or against the upsell offer).Design/methodology/approachFirst, qualitative interviews were conducted both with customers as well as managers. Moreover, in two experimental studies, different scenarios depicted an upsell situation that is common in many service encounters. After choosing a hotel room or rental car for reservation, participants were confronted with differently framed arguments to induce a shift toward an enhanced but more costly version of the initially chosen service option.FindingsThe qualitative interviews reveal that upselling is a common practice in many companies and that the manner in which the upsell is communicated has a considerable influence on its effectiveness. The first experimental study finds that the cognitive effort that customers expend in the initial choice moderates the effect of upsell messages using different goal frames. The second experimental study shows that customers are only affected by different goal frames when they feel responsible for the outcome of the final decision.Practical implicationsThe findings provide a number of useful guidelines for designing upselling strategies and may also be used to segment a firm’s customer base. On a more general level, this research also raises managers’ awareness of the sequential nature of upselling decisions and the customer’s intrinsic need to justify an upsell choice.Originality/valueThe studies contribute to the literature on customers’ service experience and upselling strategies. Upselling is conceptualized as a two-stage process in which customers’ experience in one phase influences their behavior in later stages. The underlying psychological mechanisms of this effect are also highlighted by referring to customers’ need to justify service choices to themselves.

To earn is not enough: A means-end analysis to uncover peer-providers' participation motives in peer-to-peer carsharing

Globally, the carsharing domain is growing, and new service offerings are arising. Peer-to-peer carsharing, facilitating car rental between private individuals, has attracted attention from entrepreneurs and researchers alike. Irrespective of this trend studies on carsharing have been predominantly focusing on identifying users' consumption motives in business-to-consumer contexts. Consequently, insights on consumers' motivational drivers to offer peer-to-peer carsharing services remain scarce. By conducting a series of laddering interviews with German peer-providers, we add to extant literature by uncovering four overarching motivational patterns that drive consumers' decision to participate as providers in peer-to-peer carsharing: economic interest (“earn”), quality of life (“enjoy”), helping others (“enrich”), and sustainability (“enhance”). Although self-centered motives of economic interest and quality of life are the dominating participation motives, peer-providers also seem to be intrigued by the possibility of helping others in terms of providing mobility and thereby enabling the creation of lasting memories. Paradoxically to previous assumptions regarding participation in sharing activities, sustainability is not a main participation motive for most peer-providers but is rather seen as an indirect consequence of participation.

Will You Buy a Surprise? Gender Differences in the Purchase of Surprise Offerings

In the present paper, we conceptualize and investigate customers’ preference for and responses to surprise offerings – products and services for which one or more core attributes are uncertain and unknown to the buyer at the time of purchase. We propose that an important motivation that influences choices between a surprise and a certain offering is the desire for agency over the purchase outcome, revealed by choosing a high in certainty alternative. Using gender as a proxy for chronic agentic orientation, we find that men (who have higher agentic proclivities) are less likely to opt for a surprise offering and do not respond as positively to the experience of such an offering as women (who have lower agentic proclivities) do. We examine data from two companies (car rental and travel services), an online product catalog, and several field and lab studies, thus providing robust evidence of the framework across multiple product categories and participant populations. Importantly, we conclude with a managerial roadmap that delineates the ways in which marketers can offer surprise offerings more fruitfully.

Analysis of Effect of Physical Evidence and Service Assurance on Customer Satisfaction and Customer Loyalty in using Car Rental Service (PT Pusaka Prima Transport Cases)

Business competition becomes more intense, this condition forces any kind of business to compete on a competitive basis. In conducting its business, car rental services are trying to give attention to physical evidence and assurance services, to create customer satisfaction and customer loyalty. As the observation unit, namely PT Pusaka Prima Transport, In this experiment, four (4) pieces of physical evidence variables, service assurance, and customer satisfaction as independent variables. Meanwhile, as the dependent variable is customer satisfaction and customer loyalty. The method used in this research is descriptive analysis method, using multiple regression, and tools questionnaire given to 107 consumers PT Pusaka Prima Transport. To see how much influence as well as the relationship between the physical evidence, service assurance, customer satisfaction and customer loyalty in PT Pusaka Prima Transport by using multiple regression. The results showed that the four variables have a significant influence in the amount of 42.99% for physical evidence to customer satisfaction, 18.40% for the guarantee of service to customer satisfaction, and 64.8% for customer satisfaction to customer loyalty.

VR-Tree: A novel tree-based approach for modeling Web Query Interfaces

Web Query Interfaces (WQIs) play a very important role in retrieving Deep Web content. WQIs allow users to query domain-specific databases for obtaining information of interest from diverse domains such as car rentals, hotels, airfare, etc. As the number of WQIs on the web is increasing drastically, some research efforts are focused on building a single (unified) WQI that allows users to query and integrate information available in different web databases related to a specific domain. A very important task in this WQIs’ integration process is the extraction, modeling and understanding of WQIs’ semantic content. However, this task is challenging because of the great heterogeneity in the design of WQIs. This paper presents a novel tree-based approach for the modeling and understanding of WQIs. A tree schema called the Visual Reduced Tree (VR-Tree) is built from the tree produced by a web browser’s render engine, applying a set of well- defined functions and guided by a set of heuristic rules to identify the WQI’s main components and their relationships. The proposed strategy was evaluated by running a collection of experiments over the Tel-8 and ICQ datasets from the UIUC repository. The results show that the automatic modeling of WQIs is possible with a high degree of precision if compared against previous approaches, simplifying the modeling task by only considering visual and spatial properties of WQI components using the VR-Tree schema proposed in this work.

Enterprise Rent-A-Car

An industry adage held that “there are two types of rental car companies: those that lose money and Enterprise.” The company that would become Enterprise Rent-A-Car was started in 1957 in St. Louis, Missouri, by Jack Taylor. Taylor set up Enterprise offices in neighborhoods rather than at airports because he believed that Americans would welcome a local option for renting cars when their own vehicles were being repaired. In 2010 Enterprise had more than 6,000 rental locations in the United States and a fleet of 850,000 cars in service. Its parent, Enterprise Holdings (comprising Enterprise, National, and Alamo brands) accounted for nearly half of the car rental market and was more than twice the size of Hertz, the number two competitor. Enterprise's competitive advantage was the result of the combination of its practices in hiring, training, compensation, organization, customer service, IT, and fleet management, among others.

A Bayesian hierarchical model for estimating the cost of postponing the cyclo-cross national championships

ABSTRACTIn early January 2015, the multi-event national cyclo-cross bicycle races were set to take place in Austin, Texas. Cyclo-cross has a rich history in this country, and throughout the world, attracting huge crowds and competitors. Being primarily a winter sport, these athletes often compete in harsh conditions, which include rain, snow, mud, and revel in the excitement that comes with such elements. Unfortunately, the competition was postponed mid-event when a local arborist group protested to the parks department. The issue: there was too much mud, in an event where many spectators and racers alike hope for such conditions. For many competitors, the postponement generated additional expenses, such as flights, hotels, and car rentals. Although people on opposite sides of the debate may greatly disagree, we instead focus on the competitors themselves. We analyze the financial impact of the disagreement using a hierarchical Bayesian mixed model which accounts for heterogeneity within the costs endured by the event's participants.

Differences in Rental and Nonrental Car Crashes

Although rental cars experience a higher collision rate per registered vehicle compared to nonrental cars, little research has been conducted to understand the differences in the factors contributing to crashes involving rental cars and nonrental cars, especially driver-related factors. This study develops a conceptual framework to compare the driver-related factors contributing to crashes involving rental cars and nonrental cars and tests the hypotheses developed using data from South Korea and applying the binary logistics, rare event logistics, Firth logistic models, and random parameters logit models. We found a significantly higher contribution of several risky driving behaviors but no differences in roadway, vehicle, and environmental factors. We also found that rental car crashes involve more males and drivers under 25 years of age.

Stations of the Cross

Stations of the Cross1 Roger D. Hodge (bio) I was wandering through downtown El Paso, not far from the old neighborhood of Chihuahuita, when I saw the white van. It was parked in the shade, under a tree, and spray painted across the side was the word yahweh. I parked and walked over. Two people were sitting inside, a black man and a white woman. Their son was asleep in the back. I asked about the words on their van. They told me to read the other side, so I walked around that way. yahweh said: give me your hands!! exo chap 20. The handles of the van's doors formed exclamation points. They were travelers, coming from California and heading back toward Ohio. We talked about God for a little while, and I had a hard time following what the man was saying. I asked them what they thought about the whole border situation. The man looked at me and said he didn't want to go all Nazi or anything, but it wasn't anything a few machine guns couldn't take care of. He wasn't talking about the drug smugglers. [End Page 371] And God said, Make an altar of earth for me and sacrifice on it your burnt offerings and fellowship offerings, your sheep and goats and your cattle. Wherever I cause my name to be honored, I will come to you and bless you. If you make an altar of stones for me, do not build it with dressed stones, for you will defile it if you use a tool on it. And do not go up to my altar on steps, or your private parts may be exposed. Later that day I met Rudy Garcia for the first time. He gave me a tour of his mountain shrine, a very high altar indeed. I came back a few months later, on the last Saturday in October 2011, the day before the annual pilgrimage of Mt. Cristo Rey, a mountain straddling the Mexican border just west of El Paso, crowned with a forty-two-foot-high statue of Jesus standing before his cross. Up to thirty thousand pilgrims were expected on Sunday, and preparations were under way. Garcia, a longtime member of the Mt. Cristo Rey Restoration Committee, had invited me to spend the night on the summit with him to guard against the depredations of what he called "the Satanics from Juárez." No barrier other than the mountain itself would protect us from the most dangerous city on earth. I arrived shortly before ten a.m. after driving west through El Paso alongside the Rio Grande on Paisano Drive, a stretch of road that only a decade before had been subject to cross-border bandit attacks, past a weedy, dilapidated park commemorating the spot where in 1598 Don Juan de Oñate forded the river with his colonists and his army and his priests to give El Paso its name, past the remaining buildings of Old Fort Bliss, now converted into seedy apartment buildings. An enormous smokestack displaying the word "asarco" dominated the view, not quite rivaled by the novelty of the fifteen-foot-high Homeland Security border fence looming over the roadway. Eventually, after crossing the Rio Grande into the state [End Page 372] of New Mexico, I turned off the macadam onto a gravel road that led through the bleak and blasted landscape of a defunct silica mine where paleontologists study lithified dinosaur remains. The winding road led me across the tracks of the Union Pacific Railroad and up to the base of my destination, the jagged Cristo Rey pluton, an igneous intrusion exposed by eons of erosion, jutting upward from its ancient cradle in the sediment of shallow seas. I left my rental car along the edge of an empty parking area and walked up toward a rock, cement, and galvanized-steel shelter surrounded by human figures. It was already getting hot. Jeeps and pickups drove this way and that. Fine powdery dust billowed and hung in the air. Several ranks of blue portable toilets stood off to the side, and the doors of storage sheds and containers...

“For Where Your Septic Tank is, There Your Heart Will Be Also”: Enterprise Cascadia and the Hood Canal Septic Loan Program

Jan Markham's team was currently considering Enterprise Cascadia as a potential awardee for her foundation's Community Investment Excellence Awards program. The program had been established to recognize and aid in the growth of community development financial institutions that achieved excellence in each of six areas: vision, use of funds, leadership, innovation, financial strength and performance, and impact and policy. Markham's task was to determine if Enterprise Cascadia met these requirements and if it would be a prudent investment for her foundation. Excerpt UVA-ENT-0180 Feb. 10, 2012 “FOR WHERE YOUR SEPTIC TANK IS, THERE YOUR HEART WILL BE ALSO”: ENTERPRISE CASCADIA AND THE HOOD CANAL SEPTIC LOAN PROGRAM Jan Markham made her way along the winding roads back to the Portland airport. The majestic trees emerging from the roadside mists intruded upon her thoughts as she reviewed her meetings with Enterprise Cascadia (EC). After two days of presentations and site visits in rural Oregon and Washington, she was headed home to decide with her foundation's Program-Related Investments (PRI) team whether the James A. Stonefield Foundation would be investing in EC, and if so, how the investment would be structured. Markham knew the team would likely accept her recommendation, so responsibility for the eventual decision lay with her. Markham set the rental car's cruise control and began to review the facts. Markham's team was currently considering EC as a potential awardee for the foundation's Community Investment Excellence Awards program. The program had been established to recognize and aid in the growth of community development financial institutions (CDFIs) that achieved excellence in each of six areas: vision, use of funds, leadership, innovation, financial strength and performance, and impact and policy (see Exhibit 1). Markham's task was to determine if EC met these requirements and if it would be a prudent investment for the Stonefield Foundation. The project that had captured the foundation's attention was EC's Hood Canal Regional Septic Loan Program, the result of a unique blending of public and private interests and resources. The loan program provided consumer loans for upgrading septic systems at income-adjusted (low) interest rates, and the loans were intended to benefit the homeowner, the local environment, and the local economy, which had strong ties to the health of waterways. After three years of service in the Hood Canal region of Washington, EC was seeking capital to expand the program beyond its current three-county footprint. In addition to determining whether the award's criteria were met, Markham needed to evaluate whether the firm was prepared to make the necessary financing, implementation, and managerial changes to fit a different market. . . .

ORGANIZATION OF MOTOR TRANSPORT SERVICES ON THE BASIS OF COMMERCIAL CAR SHARING

[For the English abstract and full text of the article please see the attached PDF-File (English version follows Russian version)].ABSTRACT A new form of collective use of cars for the domestic motor transport practice, the nature and varieties of car sharing, its technological features and socio-economic meaning are explored. The motives and functions of the user of commercial car sharing and car rental are compared. It is shown that it is right to consider car sharing as a self-service taxi. An analysis of advantages and disadvantages of car sharing, own car and taxi is conducted. An estimation is given to innovative forms of truck maintenance in the context of scientific and technological progress and the development of automated control systems. Keywords: transport service, organization, technology, car-sharing, commercial car sharing, taxi, car, self-service.

Pencarian Lokasi Tempat Penyewaan Mobil Daerah Kota Pangkalpinang Berbasis Sistem Informasi Geografis

Abstract – In general, the transport easier for people to help drive the take somewhere in the heading, with high mobility, a little time transport becomes an important part in supporting the speed and efficiency of work in the community, to support community facilities require that a rental car right place. But there are still many people who still do not know the location of car rental places scattered in the Region Pangkalpinang. The research objective is to provide facilities for the comfort of the car in Pangkalpinang tenants in finding information about the car rental place, making the application of geographic information system can provide information on the location of the car rental place using media websites, the study was conducted using a waterfall. This research results in the form of WebGIS, the location where a rental car will be displayed as detailed as possible in a web interface that allows the public.

Fleet asset capacity analysis and revenue management optimization using advanced prescriptive analytics

Leading a highly dynamic business, in a competitive market, in our era of globalization and social consumers, is quite challenging. This challenge is also associated with high financial risks when the business requires intensive asset investments. This is the case for the multinational Europcar in the rental car business. This paper shows how advanced analytics can be properly combined and adapted in order to improve the business management. The proper integration of math-based software can help companies to cut costs and gain market share in their complex and competitive market.

A Research Oriented To Determine the Perspectives of Car Rental Establishment Managers towards Handicapped Market

A Research Oriented To Determine the Perspectives of Car Rental Establishment Managers towards Handicapped Market

Buyback Pricing of Durable Goods in Dual Distribution Channels

In the U.S. automobile industry, manufacturers distribute products to consumers through dealers and rental agencies. By selling slightly used rental cars to consumers, rental agencies can compete directly against dealers in the sales market. To mediate this conflict between the two intermediaries, manufacturers launched buyback programs to repurchase used rental cars from rental agencies and redistribute them through dealers. Manufacturers have the option to precommit a buyback price to rental agencies at the time of initial sales or postpone the pricing decision to the time of repurchase. Using a two-period model with and without manufacturer competition in the rental market, we seek to understand how to manage buyback pricing to maximize manufacturers' profits in such dual distribution channels. Under precommitted buyback pricing, we show that the monopolist manufacturer's pricing decisions have a submodular property -- when she increases the buyback price in the rental market, she would have to decrease the wholesale price in the sales market. This tradeoff is eliminated under postponed buyback pricing. We find that precommitted buyback pricing not only leads to zero buyback quantity in equilibrium due to a low buyback price but also yields a lower manufacturer profit than postponed buyback pricing. When manufacturers compete in the rental market, however, they may prefer precommitting their buyback prices in equilibrium if the competition is sufficiently intense. This is due to a strategic complementarity between manufacturers' buyback prices.

ANALISIS YURIDIS TINDAK PIDANA PENGGELAPAN YANG TIMBUL DARI HUBUNGAN SEWA MENYEWA MOBIL DIKAITKAN DENGAN PASAL 372 KUHP

Crime embezzlement car rentals are lately often devastating car rental owner. This is an issue where the meaning of a rule of law if the crime committed community can not be followed by the rule of law, such as crimes by way of evasion is one of the types of crimes against human wealth which is stated in Article 372 of the Criminal Code, which is a crime that does not exist inexhaustible, both from the bottom layer to the top layer of society can also be committing a criminal act embezzlement is a crime that originated from the existence of a trust in others, and that trust is lost because of the lack of an honesty. It is stated that the crime of embezzlement have a problem that is closely linked to attitudes, moral, mental, honesty and trust humans as individuals. The purpose of this study are as follows: 1) To determine and analyze the occurrence of the crime of embezzlement car rental. 2) To know and analyze the application of Article 372 of the Criminal Code the crime of embezzlement in the rental car. 3) To know and analyze the efforts of the police in preventing crime of embezzlement car lease. This study uses normative juridical approach that is used to make the description clear, systematic, transparent and precise about the facts / specific nature of the area and population which is then analyzed to obtain the desired facts. Criminal offense embezzlement rental car can be imprisoned if they meet the overall elements of the offenses charged by the public prosecutor and the offender accountable for his actions. If the offender does not meet one of the elements of which the accused, then it can not be convicted. The elements of criminal responsibility are: 1) committing illegal or criminal acts; 2) for the criminal should be able to be responsible; 3) to have a fault; 4) absence of an excuse. The conclusion from this study is the adoption of Article 372 of the Criminal Code in criminal offenses of embezzlement car rental where the incidence of criminal acts committed tenants for the rented goods belonging to the owner of the rental rights because of misuse or abuse of trust in which the crime of embezzlement are set in the provisions of Article 372 of the Criminal Code.

Following the Wild Bees: The Craft and Science of Bee Hunting

Following the Wild Bees: The Craft and Science of Bee Hunting Thomas D. Seeley 2016; 184 pages, 50 color illustrations Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ ISBN: 978-1-400880-33-1 $22.95 (hardcover) ![Graphic][1] In the summer of 1975, I traveled to French Guiana to study “killer bees.” Disappointed that only a handful of swarms had colonized the trap nests he installed six months earlier, my advisor, Chip Taylor, decided we should try “bee lining.” We bought a jar of honey and headed to a nearby park. We caught several honey bees on flowers, enclosed them in a cup containing diluted honey, set the cup on the hood of our rented car, and removed the cover. I'd learned a bit about the recruitment dances performed by successful foragers but had no idea what to expect from our exercise. The bees finished feeding, circled the feeder, and flew from sight. To our amazement, a bee … [1]: /embed/inline-graphic-1.gif

Introduction: Advances in e-business engineering and management

The term ‘‘e-business’’ was coined by IBM in 1990s, and defined as business activities and processes assisted by Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). In e-commerce sector, according to a recent study, ‘‘Total e-commerce retail sale for 2014 in the US are estimated at $304.9 billion, marking a 15.4 % increase from 2013 sales. In the same time, total retail sales increased just 3.8 %. While e-commerce accounted for 6.5 % of total retail sales in 2014 (5.8 % in 2013), this number is on pace to increase at 14 % compound annual growth rate (CAGR) and will bring its share of the retail market to nearly 9 % by 2017. Not included in these calculations are the billions spent on travel booked online, including airfare, hotels, car rental and travel packages. According to comScore, US e-commerce travel sales were more than $100 billion in 2012, marking a 9 % increase from the previous year’’ [18]. Especially in the new world of IoT, cloud computing and big data science, data, processes, and devices are all converging to reshape how day-to-day business is done. E-business has rapidly evolved, is one of the most exciting and challenging research areas [11, 25, 26]. In such rapid development, new e-business engineering methods and techniques as well as e-business engineering management methods have been developed and applied [2, 5, 10, 13, 15–17, 23, 24]. To respond to the needs from both academic researchers and practitioners for communicating research results on e-business engineering methods and techniques, conference series organized by the IFIP, IEEE and other major research institutions have been developed. These conferences have provided an international forum for researchers in academia and industry to present their most recent findings in e-business engineering. This special issue of Information Technology and Management presents expanded versions of 7 papers from the above-mentioned conferences held recently, focusing on e-business engineering management. To prepare for this issue, all authors were asked to respond to at least two rounds of peer review. Each paper emphasizes the importance of e-business engineering from a unique perspective. Business transactions between different enterprises are more and more executed by a flow of well-defined electronic business documents [22]. However, the structures of these documents may significantly differ depending on industries and regions/areas/countries in which the corresponding inter-organizational business processes are executed [3, 4, 19]. In the paper by Novakovic and Huemer, a novel approach is introduced to apply the contextual knowledge for (semi-) automatically generating semantically interoperable data building blocks, so-called Core Components, comprised by electronic business documents. These documents conform to the Core Components Technical Specification (CCTS) which is proposed by the United Nations Centre for Trade Facilitation and Electronic Business (UN/CEFACT) [14]. With the development of global economic integration, technology standards have become increasingly important for business, industries, and e-business [21]. The paper entitled ‘‘Interaction between technology standardization and technology development: a coupling effect study’’ aims to extend the study about the interaction between technology standardization and technology development. & Li Da Xu lxu@odu.edu