Purchase or accept sharing? Incentivising-sharing-enabled placement strategy on a reusable transport item rental platform

Reusable Transport Items (RTIs) are essential for green logistics, and their efficient management can enhance sustainability. B2B rental platforms allow companies to share RTIs flexibly, adapting to market changes, reducing costs, and mitigating risks. However, challenges in placement policy affect RTI usability and availability. RTIs often sit idle in warehouses, not adding value. This study aims to promote B2B sharing by developing a behaviour operations research (BOR) framework for optimal RTI placement and financial incentives for business customers, with a combined approach including empirical and optimisation models. The empirical study measures the willingness to share (WTS) of business customers across industries under different incentives and RTI requirements. Incorporating WTS, a bi-objective optimisation model and algorithm are developed to determine optimal RTI purchasing and sharing incentives. Comparing cases with and without RTI sharing (i.e., purchase when RTI out-of-stock), the study shows that sharing reduces operational costs by 18.5% and benefits customers, creating a win-win. Variability analyses further indicate that optimal platform strategies require a contingent balance between ownership and incentivised sharing, with incentive levels and purchasing decisions jointly shaped by customer WTS, RTI reusability, and holding time. These findings are applicable to other sharing platforms in different industries where resource placement and sharing incentives are critical.