Cost factors in the customer-to-customer sharing when the customers are heterogeneous

As the products and services in the customer-to-customer (C2C) sharing become diverse, manufacturing firms and e-commerce platforms put great importance on the cost factors from the supply side and the demand side. In this study, we investigate the impact of different costs in the sharing economy and set up a game-theoretic model to study the pricing strategy on the C2C sharing platform. The experimental analysis shows that the firm’s profit and the platform’s profit are dependent on the cost factors when the owner and the renter have heterogeneous valuations.