Competition and Pricing Strategy of Electric Vehicle Charging Services Considering Mobile Charging

Electric vehicles (EVs) have emerged as the pivotal strategy for mitigating carbon emissions. Nevertheless, the lack and imbalance of charging facilities have greatly reduced consumers’ willingness to buy EVs, thereby leading to stagnation in the EV market. Although many studies focus on the imbalance in the EV market, few of them have explored the pricing strategies of charging service providers from the perspective of consumers. Therefore, to assist charging service providers in optimizing pricing decisions, we propose a consumer-perspective utility model. Specially, this utility model analyzes both time and travel costs. Furthermore, considering three charging technologies including fixed charging, mobile charging vehicles, and mobile charging robots, we then apply game theory to characterize charging services providers competition scenarios between charging services providers. After theoretical and numerical analyses, we have the following five conclusions: 1) with the high time cost for consumers, the profits of fixed charging exceed those of mobile charging vehicles; 2) mobile charging robots intensify competition in the charging market and lower the price of conventional charging services; 3) mobile charging robots also reduce the demands for fixed charging services and expedite technological substitution; 4) cost of consumers time has a positive influence on mobile charging vehicles but a negative effect on other charging services; and 5) profits of the three charging providers increase with higher consumer time costs. Finally, we propose an innovative market analyzing tool based on research findings to assist charging service providers in their decision-making process.