Essays on Forecasting Demand and Preferences for Cars in Emerging Markets: The Case for China.

The emerging markets (EMs) have been increasingly important in the global economy, especially during the recession. These markets have different characteristics from the developed markets such as high level of market heterogeneity (Burgess & Steenkamp, 2006; Sheth, 2011). This thesis explores how to forecast the demand for cars in a market context that has been experiencing significant and fast growth. Car sales in 2002 were only 1.25 million units in China, while the figure increased to 11.27 million by 2010. Research on car market demand in developed economies is well established, but little attention has been paid to the emerging car markets and the challenges that researchers face when they have to predict the demand or preferences for cars in the EMs. By using the Chinese car market as the market context, this thesis explores how to tackle specific problems associated with forecasting the demand for cars in an emerging market. The thesis contributes to the literature in the following ways. We apply some of the well-known techniques that have been applied in other domains and assess how they fare in predicting the demand and preferences for cars in a new market context. We also take into account that preferences and the way in which consumers make choices in some markets may require a different methodological approach. We demonstrate the importance of understanding local consumer behaviour when it comes to not only collecting the data but we also show that this may mean that we have to modify or reject some of the approaches that have been used in more mature markets. The thesis also proposes novel modelling approaches that are inspired by the specific problems of predicting car demand in China, but these proposed methods can also be replicated and tested for other products in other new emerging market economies

Exploring the communication effects of signals and messages in the COVID-19 health crisis

The ongoing coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic presents an unprecedented global public health crisis. In this scenario, crisis communication on social media that largely influences people’s emotions, attitudes and interaction behaviours towards a large-scale public health crisis plays a critical role in persuading the public’s behaviour adjustment and coping with the risk. The effects of crisis communication strategies and signals embedded in social media topics and messages warrant further investigation. This study explored and tested the communication effects of crisis messages and topics from the initial event stage to the normalized control stage of the COVID-19 crisis using texts scraped from a Chinese social media website, namely Weibo. Natural language processing (NLP) techniques, i.e., sentiment and emotion analysis, positivist text coding, and ordinary least squares (OLS) were used in data analysis. This study contributes to the crisis management literature and theories by identifying and testing a number of factors and signals in crisis communication on social media that influence receivers’ reactions and behaviours. In doing so, this study provides suggestions for practitioners and policymakers on effective communication of the crisis situation and prevention behaviours to the public

The impact of service and government-policy attributes on consumer preferences for electric vehicles in China

This research focuses on the effects of different types of service attributes and context-based government policies, along with product attributes, on Chinese consumers’ adoption of electric vehicles (EVs). Based on a stated choice experiment involving over 1,000 respondents in different cities of China, a mixed logit (MXL) model shows that typical product attributes are consistently important for potential car buyers, but that charging service has a mixed effect, depending on the level of service provision and speed. Specifically, the availability of a home charging facility has the strongest influence on consumers’ choice to purchase EVs, and the service speed of public fast service stations is also significant. In relation to government policies, this study finds that in addition to government subsidy, free licensing policy for EVs is very attractive for consumers, compared to the lottery-based licensing for conventional petrol vehicles (PVs). We find that Chinese consumers have the highest willingness to pay for obtaining a free vehicle license for EVs (106,144 RMB on average) and being permitted to install a home charging post (91,039 RMB on average). Our findings imply the importance of considering consumers’ perceived inconvenience associated with using EVs compared to buying and using conventional PVs. Furthermore, policy makers should consider the heterogeneous preference towards EVs when designing intervention policies in the Chinese market

First-time buyers' subjective knowledge and the attribute preferences of Chinese car buyers

This research focuses on the subjective knowledge of first time buyers (FTBs hereafter) and how it influences their preference attributes in a market, more specifically, the emerging Chinese car market. Previous research has considered the difference in the subjective knowledge of a product between owners and non-owners but does not account that some non-owners have stronger intentions to make a purchase. Yet, the impact of the purchase goal of FTBs on their subjective knowledge remains unexplained. This research demonstrates that the effect of the purchase goal on subjective knowledge is moderated by product ownership. Specifically, the findings show that the purchase goal only affects the level of subjective knowledge of FTB but not those of potential repurchasing buyers. Furthermore, when segmenting potential FTBs on the basis of their subjective knowledge, the segment of potential FTBs with higher subjective knowledge display similar attribute preferences to owners, while the preference differences are observed when segmenting potential buyers into owners and non-owners. From a managerial perspective, the findings of the research demonstrate the value of using subjective knowledge for consumer segmentation when targeting car buyers

On the heterogeneity in consumer preferences for electric vehicles across generations and cities in China

China is currently the world’s biggest electric vehicle (EV) market, in which mostly mature consumers in first-tier cities are buying EVs. However, the changing market and policy environment are challenging the sustainability of this trend. This study conducts a nationwide stated preference (SP) experiment in China to examine preference heterogeneity towards EVs across (1) different generations and (2) different tiers of cities. Discrete choice analysis reveals that the tier of cities has a significant effect on adoption preferences for EVs. Surprisingly, consumers in smaller cities exhibit stronger preference for EVs, while an insignificant difference in preference is found between consumers of different generations. The interaction effect between the tier of cities and the generations further demonstrates that younger consumers in small cities most prefer EVs. This can be explained by their evaluations of the psychosocial advantages of EVs and their aspiration for a future of EV-based mobility. This research contributes to the broad literature of technology adoption, but more specifically, the research offers new insights on consumers’ EV preference heterogeneity with respect to geographic and demographic dimensions. The study has important business and policy implications relating to the EV transition in China in consideration of the two tested dimensions

Buy, lease, or share?:Consumer preferences for innovative business models in the market for electric vehicles

Although business models are critical to the successful market penetration and diffusion of sustainable innovations, little is known about consumer preferences for adopting electric vehicles (EVs) under innovative business models. Drawing on existing conceptualisations of business models, we study consumers’ preferences for three innovative EV business models: (i) battery-leasing, (ii) EV-leasing, and (iii) Business-to-Customer (B2C) EV-sharing, in addition to the conventional EV-buying model. By conducting a nationwide stated preference (SP) experiment in China, we show that consumers perceive battery-leasing and EV-buying models to be close substitutes, while EV-leasing and EV-sharing models are perceived as independent. Important monetary attributes are the operational cost saving in the battery-leasing model and the leasing cost in the EV-leasing model. Critical service and policy attributes include home charging capability, vehicle licensing policy, and the density of battery-swapping stations for the battery-leasing model. We also find that female consumers, those who are well-educated, and those who have a pro-EV attitude are most likely to adopt EVs in innovative business models. Our work has significant value for companies and government in terms of better designing and supporting the innovative business models for EV adoption

Effect of self-control on health promotion behavior in patients with coronary heart disease: mediating effect of ego-depletion

The present study used a cross-sectional survey design to explore the role of ego-depletion in the relationship between self-control and health-promoting behaviors in patients with coronary heart disease (CHD). This study recruited 277 patients with CHD to measure the levels of ego-depletion, self-control and health-promotion (HP) behavior using Self-Regulatory Fatigue Scale (SRF-s), Dual-Mode of Self-Control Scale (DMSD-s) and Health Promotion Lifestyle Profile-II (HPLP-II) to examine the relationship between the three. Study found that self-control improved the patients' HP behaviors to some extent. Self-control in patients with CHD uses ego-depletion as the mediating variable to indirectly and positively predict the level of HP behavior, and the mediating effects account for 47.76% (impulsive system) and 15.6% (control system) of the total effects, respectively

Consumers’ transport and mobility decisions

Special issue guest editorial.</p

Bid price controls for car rental network revenue management

We consider a car rental network revenue management (RM) problem, accounting for the key operational characteristics of car rental services such as the varying length of rentals and mobility of inventories which imply the inter-temporal and spatial correlations of rental demands for inventories across different locations and days. The problem is formulated as an infinite-horizon cyclic stochastic dynamic program to account for the time-varying and cyclic nature of car rental businesses. To tackle the curse of dimensionality, we propose a Lagrangian relaxation (LR) approach with product- and time-dependent Lagrangian multipliers to decomposing the dynamic network problem into multiple singlestation single-day sub-problems. We show that the Lagrangian dual problem is a convex program and then develop a subgradient-based algorithm to solve the dual problem and derive an LR-based bid price policy. To improve the scalability of the LR approach, we further propose three simpler LR-based bid price policy variants with either location-dependent or leadtime-dependent Lagrangian multipliers, or both. Our numerical study indicates that the LR-based bid price policies can outperform some commonly used heuristics. Using a set of real-world booking data, we provide a case study in which we empirically demonstrate the operational characteristics of car rental services, calibrate the arrival process of booking requests using a Poisson regression model and demonstrate that the LR-based bid price policies indeed outperform other heuristics consistently in both in-sample and out-of-sample horizons.</p