| Summary |
Lu-Sheng Lee, 2008.06
Department of Transportation Technology and Management National Chiao Tung University
In recent 10 years, the increasing rate of has been increased up to 5.6% each year. To improve the level of quality on air, the development of high-efficiency and low-emission environment-friendly vehicles as well as the design of the government subsidy strategies has become an urgent and important issue. The main environment-friendly vehicles include Liquefied Petroleum Gas, Electric Power, Fuel Cell, Ethanol Fuel, Bio-diesel, Solar Power and Hybrid Electric Vehicle (HEV) in the current situation. Due to the advantages of the lower price, mature technology and non-charged batteries, HEV has become the primary product of environment-friendly vehicles.
This study aims to explore the change in the number of customers of HEV over time using a small-world model. The vehicle purchase costs, fuel cost per unit mileage and the throughput of vehicle are incorporated to formulate the utility functions of environment-friendly and traditional vehicles. In the small world model, we investigate the average degree of connectivity and the imitation rate using a survey data of consumers. By taking into account such variables as the size of the network, clustering coefficient, average path length and rewiring probability, we construct a social network and further investigate the diffusion pattern/behavior of information in the network. The combination of the choice probability and the small world network enable us to predict the number of customers of HEV over time, and to evaluate the effects of different levels of fuel price, selling price subsidy, imitation rate and connectivity on the number of customer.
The result of the case study shows that our model can effectively fit the actual amount of sales of HEV. If the government provides 10% discount on the selling price of HEV as a subsidy, the initial choice probability of HEV will increase from 2.569 % to 4.498%. There exists the heterogeneity of the choice probability for different groups of consumers. Those consumers whose incomes are more then NT$ 1,000,000 per year have the choice probability of 18.216%, which is much higher than other groups of consumers. The results of this research may provide helpful insights for the government and HEV manufacturers to design the environmental policies and pricing strategies associated with HEV. |
