Coping with Spatial Mismatch: Subsidy Design for Electric Vehicle and Charging Markets

Author(s):  
Wei Zhang ◽  
Yifan Dou

Problem definition: We study how the government should design the subsidy policy to promote electric vehicle (EV) adoptions effectively and efficiently when there might be a spatial mismatch between the supply and demand of charging piles. Academic/practical relevance: EV charging infrastructures are often built by third-party service providers (SPs). However, profit-maximizing SPs might prefer to locate the charging piles in the suburbs versus downtown because of lower costs although most EV drivers prefer to charge their EVs downtown given their commuting patterns and the convenience of charging in downtown areas. This conflict of spatial preferences between SPs and EV drivers results in high overall costs for EV charging and weak EV adoptions. Methodology: We use a stylized game-theoretic model and compare three types of subsidy policies: (i) subsidizing EV purchases, (ii) subsidizing SPs based on pile usage, and (iii) subsidizing SPs based on pile numbers. Results: Subsidizing EV purchases is effective in promoting EV adoptions but not in alleviating the spatial mismatch. In contrast, subsidizing SPs can be more effective in addressing the spatial mismatch and promoting EV adoptions, but uniformly subsidizing pile installation can exacerbate the spatial mismatch and backfire. In different situations, each policy can emerge as the best, and the rule to determine which side (SPs versus EV buyers) to subsidize largely depends on cost factors in the charging market rather than the EV price or the environmental benefits. Managerial implications: A “jigsaw-piece rule” is recommended to guide policy design: subsidizing SPs is preferred if charging is too costly or time consuming, and subsidizing EV purchases is preferred if charging is sufficiently fast and easy. Given charging costs that are neither too low nor too high, subsidizing SPs is preferred only if pile building downtown is moderately more expensive than pile building in the suburbs.

2018 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 42-61 ◽  
Author(s):  
Muhammad Shehzad Hanif ◽  
Shao Yunfei ◽  
Muhammad Imran Hanif

Purpose The paper aims to explore the long-term prospects of mobile broadband adoption in a developing country. The supply-side and demand-side policy measures are recommended to counter the challenges to broadband adoption. Design/methodology/approach Methodologically, this study uses document analysis to explain secondary data including growth statistics, trade literature and previous scholarly research. Based on the growth statistics of broadband and the informed market insights, the research discusses the prevailing market threats and recommends counter measures to improve the long-term prospects of broadband propagation. Findings The growth of mobile broadband is settling down in Pakistan due to various barriers like cost, literacy, security and unavailability of local content. Collaborative efforts are required by the government, the service providers and the people to enhance the adoption of broadband service and secure economic benefits of the broadband. Practical implications The research offers useful implications for managers and policymakers in Asian and African developing countries; the policy measures discussed here may serve as guidelines for them in the design of their own policies regarding broadband supply and demand. Originality/value The study makes an effort to examine the broadband growth in a developing country on the basis of both quantitative and qualitative aspects. The research endeavors to fill the gap on the particular scholarship of research covering potential uptake of broadband services and the effects of constraining elements to broadband adoption in a developing country.


2021 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Joshua Schmidt ◽  
Alex Altshuler

Purpose This paper aims to discuss how the tourism industry is contending with the economic and interorganizational challenges wrought by the COVID-19 outbreak and heightened by a lack of communication between the government and local businesses in the state of Israel. The researchers examine the dependency of the tourism industry on the general preparation programs that were developed and are currently being deployed by the relevant national stakeholders and question whether instead, it should use the pandemic as a catalyst for formulating its own nuanced tourism-travel-and-hospitality-oriented strategies and procedures. Design/methodology/approach Applying an ethnographic-based mix-methods research approach, this paper draws on insights from data compiled by fusing existing theoretical and emerging practical knowledge with empirical research (qualitative and quantitative) conducted among numerous relevant macro (governmental/centralized industry) and micro (hotels, travel and tourism operators and service providers) stakeholders as well as potential consumers. Findings It is essential that national and local government bodies form collaborative interorganizational relationships with local stakeholders to jointly activate case-specific hospitality and travel-specific risk mitigation management strategies. Moreover, the pandemic laid bare the tentative and fragile nature of the globalized tourism industry supply and demand chains, a condition that may be remedied via a pivot toward using national or even regional supply chains and goods and service providers. Within Israel, such changes could lead to increased economic benefits that extend beyond the tourism industry to provide certain security-related benefits. Originality/value Relating to idiosyncratic factors relevant to an Israeli cultural context, this paper uses the ethnographic field-borne familiarity of the researchers with the tourism and travel industries in Eilat and the Dead Sea to offer applicable suggestions for leveraging certain industry resources to both meet the demands of the present-day circumstances and cultivate a multifaceted organizational web of macro and micro social, economic and environmental networks so as to foster a more diversified and therefore resilient local tourism and travel economy.


2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 10
Author(s):  
Raziq Yaqub

This paper proposes system architecture and protocols for the deployment of a toll-free electric vehicle charging service. The architecture enables the party initiating the electric vehicle (EV) charging to have their service request authorized by the system and paid for by a third party.


Author(s):  
Retsef Levi ◽  
Somya Singhvi ◽  
Yanchong Zheng

Problem definition: Price surge of essential commodities despite inventory availability, due to artificial shortage, presents a serious threat to food security in many countries. To protect consumers’ welfare, governments intervene reactively with either (i) cash subsidy, to increase consumers’ purchasing power by directly transferring cash; or (ii) supply allocation, to increase product availability by importing the commodity from foreign markets and selling it at subsidized rates. Academic/practical relevance: This paper develops a new behavioral game-theoretic model to examine the supply chain and market dynamics that engender artificial shortage as well as to analyze the effectiveness of various government interventions in improving consumer welfare. Methodology: We analyze a three-stage dynamic game between the government and the trader. We fully characterize the market equilibrium and the resulting consumer welfare under the base scenario of no government intervention as well as under each of the interventions being studied. Results: The analysis demonstrates the disparate effects of different interventions on artificial shortage; whereas supply allocation schemes often mitigate shortage, cash subsidy can inadvertently aggravate shortage in the market. Furthermore, empirical analysis with actual data on onion prices in India shows that the proposed model explains the data well and provides specific estimates on the implied artificial shortage. A counterfactual analysis quantifies the potential impacts of government interventions on market outcomes. Managerial implications: The analysis shows that reactive government interventions with supply allocation schemes can have a preemptive effect to reduce the trader’s incentive to create artificial shortage. Although cash subsidy schemes have recently gained wide popularity in many countries, we caution governments to carefully consider the strategic responses of different stakeholders in the supply chain when implementing cash subsidy schemes.


2012 ◽  
Vol 15 (05) ◽  
pp. 1150024 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. P. M. HENDRIKS ◽  
D. ARMBRUSTER ◽  
M. LAUMANNS ◽  
E. LEFEBER ◽  
J. T. UDDING

We consider a third party logistics service provider (LSP), who faces the problem of distributing different products from suppliers to consumers having no control on supply and demand. In a third party set-up, the operations of transport and storage are run as a black box for a fixed price. Thus the incentive for an LSP is to reduce its operational costs. The objective of this paper is to find an efficient network topology on a tactical level, which still satisfies the service level agreements on the operational level. We develop an optimization method, which constructs a tactical network topology based on the operational decisions resulting from a given model predictive control (MPC) policy. Experiments suggest that such a topology typically requires only a small fraction of all possible links. As expected, the found topology is sensitive to changes in supply and demand averages. Interestingly, the found topology appears to be robust to changes in second order moments of supply and demand distributions.


Energies ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (24) ◽  
pp. 8204
Author(s):  
Soomin Woo ◽  
Zhe Fu ◽  
Elpiniki Apostolaki-Iosifidou ◽  
Timothy E. Lipman

This article addresses the problem of estimating the potential economic and environmental gains for utility grids of shifting the electric-vehicle (EV) charging time and location. The current literature on shifting EV charging loads has been limited by real-world data availability and has typically therefore relied on simulated studies. Collaborating with a large automobile company and a major utility grid operator in California, this research used actual EV operational data and grid-operation data including locational marginal prices, marginal-grid-emission-rate data, and renewable-energy-generation ratio information. With assumptions about the future potential availability of EV charging stations, this research estimated the maximum potential gains in the economic and environmental performance of the electrical-grid operation by optimizing the time and location of EV charging. For the problem of rescheduling the charging sessions, the optimization models and objective functions were specifically designed based on the information available to the energy system operators that influence their economic and environmental performance like grid congestion, emissions, and renewable energy. The results present the maximum potential in reducing the operational costs and the marginal emissions and increasing the renewable energy use in the utility grid by rescheduling the EV charging load with respect to its time and location. The analysis showed that the objective functions of minimizing the marginal cost or the marginal emission rate performed the best overall.


2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (6) ◽  
pp. 1268-1286 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tim Kraft ◽  
León Valdés ◽  
Yanchong Zheng

Problem definition: We examine how a profit-driven firm (she) can motivate better social responsibility (SR) practices by a supplier (he) when these practices cannot be perfectly observed by the firm. We focus on the firm’s investment in the supplier’s SR capabilities. To capture the influence of consumer demands, we incorporate the potential for SR information to be disclosed by the firm or revealed by a third party. Academic/practical relevance: Most firms have limited visibility into the SR practices of their suppliers. However, there is little research on how a firm under incomplete visibility should (i) invest to improve a supplier’s SR practices and (ii) disclose SR information to consumers. We address this gap. Methodology: We develop a game-theoretic model with asymmetric information to study a supply chain with one supplier and one firm. The firm makes her investment decision given incomplete information about the supplier’s current SR practices. We analyze and compare two settings: the firm does not disclose versus she discloses SR information to the consumers. Results: The firm should invest a high (low) amount in the supplier’s capabilities if the information she observes suggests the supplier’s current SR practices are poor (good). She should always be more aggressive with her investment when disclosing (versus not disclosing). This more aggressive strategy ensures better supplier SR practices under disclosure. When choosing between disclosing and not disclosing, the firm most likely prefers not to disclose when the supplier’s current SR practices seem to be average. Managerial implications: (i) Greater visibility helps the firm to better tailor her investment to the level of support needed. (ii) Better visibility also makes the firm more “truthful” in her disclosure, whereas increased third-party scrutiny makes her more “cautious.” (iii) Mandating disclosure is most beneficial for SR when the suppliers’ current practices seem to be average.


Author(s):  
Fernando Bernstein ◽  
Gregory A. DeCroix ◽  
N. Bora Keskin

Problem definition: This paper explores the impact of competition between platforms in the sharing economy. Examples include the cases of Uber and Lyft in the context of ride-sharing platforms. In particular, we consider competition between two platforms that offer a common service (e.g., rides) through a set of independent service providers (e.g., drivers) to a market of customers. Each platform sets a price that is charged to customers for obtaining the service provided by a driver. A portion of that price is paid to the driver who delivers the service. Both customers’ and drivers’ utilities are sensitive to the payment terms set by the platform and are also sensitive to congestion in the system (given by the relative number of customers and drivers in the market). We consider two possible settings. The first one, termed “single-homing,” assumes that drivers work through a single platform. In the second setting, termed “multihoming” (or “multiapping,” as it is known in practice), drivers deliver their service through both platforms. Academic/practical relevance: This is one of the first papers to study competition and multihoming in the presence of congestion effects typically observed in the sharing economy. We leverage the model to study some practical questions that have received significant press attention (and stirred some controversies) in the ride-sharing industry. The first involves the issue of surge pricing. The second involves the increasingly common practice of drivers choosing to operate on multiple platforms (multihoming). Methodology: We formulate our problem as a pricing game between two platforms and employ the concept of a Nash equilibrium to analyze equilibrium outcomes in various settings. Results: In both the single-homing and multihoming settings, we study the equilibrium prices that emerge from the competitive interaction between the platforms and explore the supply and demand outcomes that can arise at equilibrium. We build on these equilibrium results to study the impact of surge pricing in response to a surge in demand and to examine the incentives at play when drivers engage in multihoming. Managerial implications: We find that raising prices in response to a surge in demand makes drivers and customers better off than if platforms were constrained to charge the same prices that would arise under normal demand levels. We also compare drivers’ and customers’ performance when all drivers either single-home or multihome. We find that although individual drivers may have an incentive to multihome, all players are worse off when all drivers multihome. We conclude by proposing an incentive mechanism to discourage multihoming.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 2
Author(s):  
Trin Thananusak ◽  
Prattana Punnakitikashem ◽  
Sitthichai Tanthasith ◽  
Boonying Kongarchapatara

This article explored the development of electric vehicle (EV) charging stations in Thailand between 2015 and 2020. This research aimed to study the main players and examine their goals, strategies, and operations in the EV charging business as well as the key issues that these charging operators have encountered in developing charging stations. The authors collected qualitative data (direct interviews with managers, video interviews, news, research articles, industry reports and press releases of EV charging operators) and used a constant comparison approach to analyze the data. The study found that after 2015, the Thai government created technology-push policies to kick-start the investment in the EV charging station business (such as subsidies for charging stations, setting a temporary selling price for electricity and building an EV charging consortium). The main players in the Thai charging business include: (1) oil and gas companies; (2) electricity state enterprises; (3) green energy companies; (4) start-ups; and (5) automotive companies. The goals of investing in the charging business for the oil and gas incumbents were to find a new growth engine and to prepare for the potential disruption in the energy sector whereas the green energy companies and start-ups wanted to capture customer bases in this promising industry. These players tended to use a partnership strategy to expand charging networks at key locations (malls, restaurants, offices). Regarding the key issues in expanding the EV charging network, the operators suggested that the high upfront investment costs, small number of EV users, and the high electricity prices (from the demand charge and usage guarantee fee) make them ‘wait-and-see’ and cautiously expand the charging network. Finally, we found that the government tried to address the constraints by setting up a national EV policy committee to accelerate EV adoption and EV charging stations in Thailand. The committee also set a fixed and reduced electricity price for charging operators.


2021 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 78-91
Author(s):  
Faiz Rafiza Ahmadani ◽  
Rafi Aquary

The current surplus of electricity across Indonesia has further underlined many opportunities to optimize the usage of electricity in many sectors; including on the issue of Electric Vehicle (EV) ownership within the country. According to the government’s projection, the state-owned enterprise (SOE) of PLN would construct 254.181 units of charging stations by 2030. However, there exists the problem of ‘chicken and egg’; in which more EV charging stations would be required to spur EV sales and vice versa. In addition to that, the lack of charging stations has also led to the disinterest from the public to purchase EVs due to fear of range anxiety. Hence, this paper is written to address the importance of publicly funded charging stations in Indonesia to help cultivate EV development within the country. Not only that, since Indonesia is the largest member country of ASEAN, it could be the ‘trendsetter’ of this issue in the region and would have the upper hand position as an early adopter. Our hypotheses suggest that not only publicly funded the development of charging stations would be beneficial to the future-buyer of EV, but also for the government itself.     Keywords: Electric Vehicle, Charging Station, Public-Funded, Range Anxiety   


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