Acceptance analysis of value-creating service cooperations and extensions for Mobility-on-Demand solutions

The mobility sector is considered one of the key levers for achieving the climate targets specified in the Paris Agreement and reducing carbon dioxide emissions in cities. To achieve this goal, lower-emission mobility solutions such as public transport, cycling or shared forms of mobility are increasingly strengthened and expanded. Mobility-on-Demand (MOD) offers innovative transport solutions that can compete with the private vehicle in terms of comfort or flexibility. However, this mode of transport faces the following major challenges: the user group is still very small as the service is operating only in specific cities or regions and the operation is quite expensive. Thus, it’s quite difficult for MOD providers to elaborate a sustainable business model. A good way to achieve more profitability is to exploit potential synergies through service collaborations, which at the same time increases popularity. Therefore, this study addresses the research questions of whether and which specific service collaborations significantly increase the acceptance as well as the likelihood to use MOD. To answer the research questions, an online survey in Germany, Switzerland and Austria was conducted. Three different areas of cooperation were tested for acceptance: mobility service providers (e.g., public transit), other service providers (e.g., hotel, restaurant) and retail stores. A total of n=1403 respondents were included in the online survey. Univariate ANOVA with repeated measures and t-tests were used to analyse the potential cooperations. The results show that the cooperation between MOD providers and other business partners is generally accepted as a value creating service extension, and that cooperation with public transport is descriptively the most attractive. Furthermore, cooperations with mobility service providers and other service providers lead to a significantly higher probability of using on-demand shuttles (even among non-users). Therefore, it is hypothesized that these two collaborative opportunities are a suitable means to increase the use and profitability of on-demand shuttles and attract new target groups. It is recommended that those collaborations should be pursued and analysed in future research or pilots.