The phenomenon of transportation service providers (TSPs) engaging in both competition and cooperation, commonly referred to as coopetition, has become increasingly prevalent in the transportation market. This is driven by the rapid advancements in information technology and sharing economy. In practice, competitive TSPs can engage in a resource exchange scheme to share their resources to improve their service quality. However, such a resource exchange scheme may not be sustained since the service prices and profits will be further changed due to the competition in the end market. This study proposes a two-stage sequential-move game to characterize the coopetition problem between TSPs, wherein the first-stage resource exchange problem is modeled with a Nash bargaining game, and the second-stage pricing problem is modeled with a non-cooperative Nash game. Different from prior studies, our model incorporates the supply–demand congestion effects and the asymmetric bargaining power of TSPs. The subsequent impacts on social welfare, TSPs, and end users are investigated. Analytical results show that only when the unit price of the exchanged resources decreases in the exchanged resource quantity will the resource-exchange scheme succeed. Furthermore, we find that TSPs prefer to leave some “buffer zone” in between to avoid fierce competition with price wars.

中文翻译：

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考虑供需拥堵效应和议价能力不对称的运输服务提供商之间的战略合作


交通运输市场中，交通服务提供商（TSP）既竞争又合作（通常称为竞合）的现象日益普遍。这是由信息技术和共享经济的快速发展推动的。在实践中，有竞争力的运输服务提供商可以通过资源交换计划来共享资源，以提高服务质量。然而，这种资源交换方案可能无法持续，因为终端市场的竞争将进一步改变服务价格和利润。本研究提出了一个两阶段顺序移动博弈来描述 TSP 之间的合作问题，其中第一阶段资源交换问题用纳什讨价还价博弈建模，第二阶段定价问题用非合作纳什建模游戏。与之前的研究不同，我们的模型考虑了供需拥挤效应和 TSP 的不对称议价能力。对社会福利、TSP 和最终用户的后续影响进行了调查。分析结果表明，只有当交换资源的单价低于交换资源数量时，资源交换方案才会成功。此外，我们发现TSP更愿意在两者之间留下一些“缓冲区”，以避免激烈的价格战竞争。