Incentive approaches in shared micromobility: a systematic review

Abstract Shared micromobility systems offer promising solutions for urban mobility challenges, particularly in addressing first- and last-mile connectivity. High operational costs, particularly those associated with vehicle redistribution, remain a critical barrier to the economic viability of shared micromobility systems. User incentives have been proposed as a strategy to reduce redistribution costs, yet a comprehensive overview of existing mechanisms and their effectiveness is missing. This systematic review investigates technical approaches to incentivize users to support fleet rebalancing. Following PRISMA 2020 guidelines, 50 peer-reviewed studies published between 2013 and December 2025 were analyzed from six major databases (coverage constraints noted in Methods): ACM, IEEE Xplore, Web of Science, Scopus, ScienceDirect and eLibrary. The systematic review categorizes incentive mechanisms by rental mode, vehicle type, and operational strategy. To complement academic sources, provider websites were examined as grey literature to identify real-world implementations; however, this search did not yield any relevant results. Most studies focus on station-based bike-sharing systems and rely on simulation-based evaluations using publicly available datasets. Our synthesis indicates that most designs optimize for walking distance and station/region imbalance, whereas battery charge, weather, and explicit budgets remain rare in models. No public, provider-side evidence of deployed cost-reducing incentive algorithms was found. These findings call for budget-aware, context-rich designs and field validations, particularly for electric fleets.