As the sharing economy develops in sustainable transportation, car-sharing platforms improve the allocation efficiency of idle cars to customers. However, as the travel demand increases, and the vehicle type becomes various, the sharing market faces a new challenge to satisfy the customers’ diverse needs for quality-differentiated cars. Each customer would like to choose the right car type, while the manufacturing firm and the e-commerce platform should set the right car price for profit maximization. How to match the platform’s product line with the customer’s choice behavior becomes a problem for all the stakeholders in the sharing economy. From the perspective of customer heterogeneity, we establish a game-theoretic framework to study product line optimization in business-to-consumer (B2C) and consumer-to-consumer (C2C) sharing. We solve the optimal quality decision and the optimal pricing strategy for the manufacturing firm and the e-commerce platform in the sharing economy. In numerical experiments, we investigate how the sensitivity of the quality and the cost can jointly influence the profits of sustainable transportation. Our findings show that within the product line, the firm’s selling profit in the C2C sharing is negatively influenced by the sharer’s valuation, while the platform’s sharing profit in the B2C sharing is independent of either buyer’s valuation. We give some policy implications for scholars, practitioners, and policymakers in the sharing economy and point out some limitations and recommendations for the product line design.

This study, set against the backdrop of escalating trade tensions between China and the United States, examines the impact of soybean tariff adjustments on the abnormal asymmetric behavior in the futures market. By employing specialized analytical methods that capture market volatility asymmetry and event study techniques, we focus on the multi-stage soybean tariff adjustments to analyze their effects on market return transmission, volatility asymmetry, and market stability. This study compares the market responses to positive and negative shocks and the distinct performances of the futures markets in China and the United States, with the core aim of verifying whether soybean tariff shocks trigger abnormal asymmetric behavior in the futures market. The results show that tariff shocks significantly lead to asymmetric characteristics in market volatility, with negative shocks having a more pronounced impact on market volatility than positive ones. During the trading days before and after the announcement of tariff policies, the cumulative abnormal return difference, which measures the disparity in market reactions to related assets, also rose significantly. This indicates that tariff adjustments are the core factor causing abnormal asymmetric phenomena in the market, and the commodity futures market needs to pay attention to such asymmetric risks triggered by policies. The value of this study lies in its targeted analysis of the dynamic impact of tariff shocks, combined with volatility analysis and event study methods, to quantify the asymmetric effects in cross-border markets. The research conclusions can help investors avoid risks related to trade policies and provide references for policymakers to stabilize fluctuations in the commodity market, ultimately facilitating the market’s more efficient response to trade policy shocks and reducing information asymmetry in futures market pricing.

The development of electric vehicles incurs the consumer's variety seeking in the sharing economy. In addition to being passengers on the sharing platform, customers can rent electric vehicles from the rental company as ride-hailing drivers, rather than purchasing from the manufacturing firm. In this article, we set up a game-theoretic model to study the customer's variety-seeking behavior in the new frenemy partnership and solve the equilibrium pricing strategy and quality decision for the rental company and the sharing platform. The numerical experiments show that the rental company's price is less influenced by the valuation heterogeneity, but the sharing platform's price is the opposite. Given some real-world examples of product ownership and product usage in sustainable transportation, we discuss the consumer's variety seeking and the company/platform's pricing strategy from both the passenger and driver sides.