Transportation in the Sharing Economy

Margaretha Gansterer (), Richard F. Hartl () and Michal Tzur ()
Additional contact information
Margaretha Gansterer: Department of Operations, Energy, and Environmental Management, University of Klagenfurt, 9020 Klagenfurt, Austria
Richard F. Hartl: Department of Business Decisions and Analytics, University of Vienna, 1090 Vienna, Austria
Michal Tzur: Department of Industrial Engineering, Iby and Aladar Fleischman Faculty of Engineering, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv 6997801, Israel

Transportation Science, 2022, vol. 56, issue 3, 567-570

Abstract: Traditionally, individuals and firms have bought and owned resources. For instance, owning a car was a status symbol for people. In recent years, this focus has changed. Young people just want to have some convenient means of transportation available. Sharing cars, bikes, or rides is also acceptable and has the advantage of increased sustainability compared with everyone owning such a device. A similar development can also be observed in industry. Already for decades, smaller farmers in rural areas have shared some expensive harvesting machines, via cooperatives. In recent years, cost pressures have incentivized all firms to use their equipment more efficiently and to avoid idle capacities. This has led, among other things, to the exchange of transportation requests between smaller carriers, when one of them faces an overload situation and another has idle resources. Similarly, some production firms share storage space and logistics service providers operate this storage jointly with greater efficiency than each firm could do separately. All these tendencies have led to the development of a new paradigm, the “Sharing Economy.” In transportation, these resources are the vehicles used to deliver goods or move passengers. Given an increasing pressure to act economically and ecologically sustainable, efficient mechanisms that help to benefit from idle capacities are on the rise. They are typically organized through digital platforms that facilitate the efficient exchange of goods or services and help cope with data privacy issues. Both transportation companies and heavy users of transportation services need to learn how to play in a world of shared idle capacities. “Transportation in the Sharing Economy” was the theme of the 2019 Transportation Science and Logistics Workshop held in Vienna, and it is therefore also the focus of this associated special issue. The papers included cover several forms of shared resources in transportation, where the first part deals with freight, whereas in the second part, the focus lies on passenger transportation. Each study highlights the benefits of sharing resources. We received 40 submissions, of which 10 papers were accepted for this special issue after the reviewing process.

Date: 2022
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/trsc.2022.1143 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:inm:ortrsc:v:56:y:2022:i:3:p:567-570

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Transportation Science from INFORMS Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Asher ().