Operational strategy of customized bus considering customers’ variety seeking behavior and service level

In recent years, customized bus (CB) is becoming an innovative model of the public transport system (PTS) in China. This service provides an advanced, timely, personalized, and flexible responses to the demand of the PTS, especially of commuters. Obviously, it could have an impact on public transport (PT) service. For instance, CB services influence the customers' variety-seeking behavior, which results in changes of customer options in different periods. Therefore, customers could be divided into different groups of preference. In this paper, we construct a two-period Hotelling game model by variety-seeking behavior and service level. The results show that, in the first stage, the departure frequency of CB and PT is influenced by variety-seeking behavior and service level. In the second stage, departure frequency is influenced by service level only. Next, although the departure frequency of bus impacts the changes of passenger ratios in different stages, service level appreciably impacts passenger number. From customer surplus and social welfare, we find that adjustment of service level can increase social welfare, which means that CB and PT will reach an optimum effect. The present work can provide a valuable reference to policymakers, practitioners, and others.