Abstract Loyalty programs are important tools for sharing platforms seeking to grow supply. Online sharing platforms use loyalty programs to heavily subsidize resource providers, encouraging participation and boosting supply. As the sharing economy has evolved and competition has increased, the design of loyalty programs has begun to play a crucial role in the pursuit of maximal revenue. In this paper, we first characterize the optimal loyalty program for a platform with homogeneous users. We then show that optimal revenue in a heterogeneous market can be achieved by a class of multi-threshold loyalty program (MTLP) which admits a simple implementation-friendly structure. We also study the performance of loyalty programs in a setting with two competing sharing platforms, showing that the degree of heterogeneity is a crucial factor for both loyalty programs and pricing strategies. Our results show that sophisticated loyalty programs that reward suppliers via stepwise linear functions outperform simple sign-up bonuses, which give them a one time reward for participating.

中文翻译：

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共享经济中的忠诚度计划：最优性与竞争

摘要 忠诚度计划是寻求增加供应的共享平台的重要工具。在线共享平台使用忠诚度计划来大量补贴资源提供者，鼓励参与并增加供应。随着共享经济的发展和竞争的加剧，忠诚度计划的设计在追求最大收益方面开始发挥关键作用。在本文中，我们首先描述了具有同质用户的平台的最佳忠诚度计划。然后我们表明，可以通过一类多阈值忠诚度计划 (MTLP) 实现异构市场中的最佳收入，该计划采用简单的实施友好型结构。我们还研究了在具有两个相互竞争的共享平台的环境中忠诚度计划的表现，表明异质性程度是忠诚度计划和定价策略的关键因素。我们的结果表明，通过逐步线性函数奖励供应商的复杂忠诚度计划优于简单的注册奖金，这为他们的参与提供了一次性奖励。