Availability-based dynamic pricing on a round-trip carsharing service: an explorative analysis using agent-based simulation

Carsharing companies aim to customize their service to increase fleet usage and revenues with different pricing schemes and offer types. Dynamic pricing policies can be designed to adjust and balance temporally and spatially cars availability but may pose some question on customers’ fairness. In this paper, we propose an explorative analysis of how an availability-based dynamic pricing scheme impacts the demand and the supply performance. The policy is simulated in MATSim and compared to a fixed pricing policy scheme. This simulation consists of analyzing the behavior of a synthetic population of car-sharing members for Berlin and the surrounding region in which is applied an availability-based dynamic pricing in which price depends on vehicle availability in booking stations. Results show that when the dynamic pricing is applied there is a light decrease in the number of bookings and people with low value of time tend to abandon the carsharing mode in favor of other modes of transportation.