Preferences for car sharing service attributes among university students: Evidence from an emerging market

Car sharing is a specific business model that allows a new form of personal mobility. University students, generally very receptive to the concept of a sharing economy, are recognized as a prospective customer group for car sharing operators. This paper proposes an ex ante analysis that aims to reveal how students from an area where car sharing is underdeveloped perceive this mobility option. University students in Belgrade were asked to state their preferences regarding a mix of attributes and levels replicating service design from current practice. Preferences for particular service attributes were explored using stated preference survey and Choice-Based Conjoint analysis, while further preference-based segmentation was obtained using the Partitioning Around Medoids method. The contribution of this work is that it delivers findings on an emerging car-sharing market where there is very little research on user profiles. From a methodological point of view, we form distinctive customer clusters based on the uniformity of their preferences. By being aware of users’ prior expectations, service providers can determine their operational priorities more easily when unlocking the market. The paper outlines both the similarities and differences between students in an emerging market and their counterparts in more developed countries. Our findings reveal that the student population is homogeneous regarding critical aspects of service adoption like cost, distance to vehicles, and parking convenience. Specific service attributes such as the pricing scheme and keeping vehicles clean are found to be issues of peculiar interest in our study market. Although our proposed approach to shaping user preferences was developed for car sharing analysis it is applicable to other service-oriented businesses in the initiation phase.