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Loyalty Programs in the Sharing Economy: Optimality and Competition

Authors:

Adam WiermanAuthors Info & Claims

Mobihoc '18: Proceedings of the Eighteenth ACM International Symposium on Mobile Ad Hoc Networking and Computing

Pages 131 - 140

https://doi.org/10.1145/3209582.3209596

Published: 26 June 2018 Publication History

Abstract

Loyalty programs are important tools for sharing platforms seeking to grow supply. Online sharing platforms use loyalty programs to heavily subsidize resource providers, encouraging participation and boosting supply. As the sharing economy has evolved and competition has increased, the design of loyalty programs has begun to play a crucial role in the pursuit of maximal revenue. In this paper, we first characterize the optimal loyalty program for a platform with homogeneous users. We then show that optimal revenue in a heterogeneous market can be achieved by a class of multi-threshold loyalty program (MTLP) which admits a simple implementation-friendly structure. We also study the performance of loyalty programs in a setting with two competing sharing platforms, showing that the degree of heterogeneity is a crucial factor for both loyalty programs and pricing strategies. Our results show that sophisticated loyalty programs that reward suppliers via stepwise linear functions outperform simple sign-up bonuses, which give them a one time reward for participating.

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Cited By

Liu TXu ZVignon DYin YQin ZLi Q(2023)Threshold-based incentives for ride-sourcing drivers: Implications on supply management and welfare effectsTransportation Research Part C: Emerging Technologies10.1016/j.trc.2023.104323156(104323)Online publication date: Nov-2023
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.trc.2023.104323
Wang GZhang FZhang D(2023)When mobility on demand meets vehicle electrification: a longitudinal study on evolution of city-scale ridesharingCCF Transactions on Pervasive Computing and Interaction10.1007/s42486-023-00125-w5:2(226-240)Online publication date: 6-Feb-2023
https://doi.org/10.1007/s42486-023-00125-w
Fan GJin HZhao YSong YGan XDing JSu LWang X(2022)Joint Order Dispatch and Charging for Electric Self-Driving Taxi SystemsIEEE INFOCOM 2022 - IEEE Conference on Computer Communications10.1109/INFOCOM48880.2022.9796825(1619-1628)Online publication date: 2-May-2022
https://doi.org/10.1109/INFOCOM48880.2022.9796825
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Loyalty Programs in the Sharing Economy: Optimality and Competition
1. Applied computing
  1. Law, social and behavioral sciences
    1. Economics
2. Networks
  1. Network algorithms
    1. Network economics

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cover image ACM Conferences

Mobihoc '18: Proceedings of the Eighteenth ACM International Symposium on Mobile Ad Hoc Networking and Computing

June 2018

329 pages

ISBN:9781450357708

DOI:10.1145/3209582

Copyright � 2018 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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SIGMOBILE: ACM Special Interest Group on Mobility of Systems, Users, Data and Computing

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 26 June 2018

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Research-article
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Funding Sources

National Science Foundation
China Youth 1000-Talent Grant
National Natural Science Foundation of China
Tsinghua Initiative Research Grant

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Mobihoc '18

Sponsor:

SIGMOBILE

Mobihoc '18: The Eighteenth ACM International Symposium on Mobile Ad Hoc Networking and Computing

June 26 - 29, 2018

CA, Los Angeles, USA

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Overall Acceptance Rate 296 of 1,843 submissions, 16%

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Cited By

Liu TXu ZVignon DYin YQin ZLi Q(2023)Threshold-based incentives for ride-sourcing drivers: Implications on supply management and welfare effectsTransportation Research Part C: Emerging Technologies10.1016/j.trc.2023.104323156(104323)Online publication date: Nov-2023
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.trc.2023.104323
Wang GZhang FZhang D(2023)When mobility on demand meets vehicle electrification: a longitudinal study on evolution of city-scale ridesharingCCF Transactions on Pervasive Computing and Interaction10.1007/s42486-023-00125-w5:2(226-240)Online publication date: 6-Feb-2023
https://doi.org/10.1007/s42486-023-00125-w
Fan GJin HZhao YSong YGan XDing JSu LWang X(2022)Joint Order Dispatch and Charging for Electric Self-Driving Taxi SystemsIEEE INFOCOM 2022 - IEEE Conference on Computer Communications10.1109/INFOCOM48880.2022.9796825(1619-1628)Online publication date: 2-May-2022
https://doi.org/10.1109/INFOCOM48880.2022.9796825
Wang CSong YWei YFan GJin HZhang F(2021)Towards Minimum Fleet for Ridesharing-Aware Mobility-on-Demand SystemsIEEE INFOCOM 2021 - IEEE Conference on Computer Communications10.1109/INFOCOM42981.2021.9488862(1-10)Online publication date: 10-May-2021
https://doi.org/10.1109/INFOCOM42981.2021.9488862
Zhao YFan GJin HMa WHe BWang X(2021)Joint Order Dispatch and Repositioning for Urban Vehicle Sharing Systems via Robust Optimization2021 IEEE 41st International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS)10.1109/ICDCS51616.2021.00069(663-673)Online publication date: Jul-2021
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICDCS51616.2021.00069
Zhang YZhou YLiu ZBarua BNguyen D(2020)Toward Efficient Network Resource Sharing: From One-Sided Market to Two-Sided MarketIEEE Wireless Communications10.1109/MWC.001.190019127:2(141-147)Online publication date: Apr-2020
https://doi.org/10.1109/MWC.001.1900191
Wang HYang H(2019)Ridesourcing systems: A framework and reviewTransportation Research Part B: Methodological10.1016/j.trb.2019.07.009129(122-155)Online publication date: Nov-2019
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.trb.2019.07.009

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