Consumer Preference for Car Sharing and the Role of Car Plate Lottery Policy: A Stated Preference Experiment in Beijing

Car sharing is promoted as a prominent alternative to private cars, and is therefore seemed as a sustainable innovation for urban mobility. Many policy makers introduced various incentives to facilitate the development of car sharing services as a complement to other public policies to contain the growth of car ownership. In this paper, we use a stated preference experiment to study consumer preferences for car sharing in transport ecosystem, considering a wide range of mobility modes and accounting for a regulatory policy of car plate lottery that aims to limit car ownership in Beijing. Based on a nested logit model, we identify a hierarchical structure of mobility mode choice, where bus and underground fall in the same nest of “public transit”, while car-sharing, private car and taxi are independent alternatives. We find that, in addition to the mobility cost, service accessibility and mobility speed are key attributes for consumers to choose car sharing. More importantly, we find that consumers who are participating in the car plate lottery would be more likely to choose car sharing, which implies that car sharing and the car plate lottery policy are indeed complementary. However, the introduction of car sharing can also lead to an unintended consequence of higher total car usage by attracting more public transit users who did not intend to buy cars to drive cars. Therefore, our study provides new insights into not only the marketing and operation strategies of car sharing service, but also the role of public policies in shaping the consumer preferences for car sharing.