Surge sourcing via hybrid supply in a sharing economy: a resource-efficient, progressive and sustainable way to satisfy surge demand

We propose a surge sourcing approach to address occasional synchronous high demand (surge demand) in sharing economy systems, providing a socio-economically progressive alternative to surge pricing. Instead of suppressing demand among disadvantaged consumers, our scheme increases supply by involving consumer-providers (called prosumers) who under-utilise their resources. This hybrid supply approach maintains high quality-of-service (QoS) for both consumers and prosumers in both normal and surge demand situations without surge pricing. To ensure prosumer QoS, we reserve a small portion of the primary supply to meet their needs if their resources become unavailable during surge periods. As the probability of such events is low compared to that of the surge demand itself, the reserved resources required are minimal. The resulting scheme is resource-efficient, socially progressive, and sustainable, exploiting under-utilised resources. We illustrate our scheme through two applications: long-range car sharing for owners of small EVs, and shared charge-points for EV drivers.