Optimal Pricing Strategy of Sharing Parking Platform Considering the Perceived Heterogeneity of Inconvenience Costs

Shared parking has been regarded as an effective means to solve the urban parking problem, but its development is slow due to unreasonable pricing and the inconvenience perceived by parking space owners and travelers in parking sharing. In response to this problem, considering the heterogeneity of perceived inconvenience cost, the optimal pricing strategy of sharing parking platform with two alternative objectives: profit maximization or social welfare maximization are examined by analyzing the decision-making behaviors of the owners and travelers in the two-sided market. And the number of shared participants under the optimal pricing is discussed. Finally, the influence of related factors on the optimal pricing and the number of participants is further explored by numerical examples. The results show that compared with the profit-maximizing platform, social-welfare-maximizing platform’s optimal commission rate and shared parking fee are lower, while the number of shared parking participants is larger when the management cost of successfully matched parking spaces is small. The local authority may set price upper bounds or entry standards for profit-maximizing platform, or provide profit subsidies to encourage the platform to set lower prices, which are helpful to achieve social welfare maximization. When the management cost is too high, neither platform can make profits, and there are no owners and travelers willing to participate in sharing. Improving the convenience of parking sharing, reducing the management cost of shared parking spaces and increasing the curbside parking fee all contribute to motivating the owners and travelers to participate in and promoting the development of shared parking.