In the context of sharing economy, a manufacturer can source from two alternative channels: sharing and traditional, when facing production capacity constraints and sustainably conscious consumers. The aim of the paper is to analyze channel selection and pricing strategies of the manufacturer for achieving sustainable operations, to investigate the operations of the platform regarding charging modes, access requirements, and commission rates in different stages of development, and to discuss the interaction among all stakeholders for sustainability in the whole system. The game-theoretic approach is adopted. The results provide references for decisions of the manufacturer and surplus production capacity supplier to join in the sharing, as well as corresponding optimal pricing strategies, which guides platforms to keep a balance between profitability and attracting participants by relatively low access requirements and commission rates. Moreover, developing platforms prefer to charge suppliers and set low access requirements while relatively developed platforms tend to charge bilateral sides or manufacturers and set high access requirements. Charging the manufacturer encourages the bilateral participation of the platform most. In addition, as charging mode changes, the trend of changes in consumer surplus and social welfare is the same as that in the market share of products from the sharing channel.More specifically, from the perspective of actual operations, production capacity sharing brings new directions to sustainable supply chain management issues. For example, as consumers have become more sustainably concerned [16,17], production capacity sharing on the platforms is an effective alternative for manufacturing enterprises to ensure competitive advantage by meeting demands of the market, reduce their risk of wasting capacity, no longer face with the selection limitations, optimize business scheduling, and gain new revenue streams [13]. However, production capacity sharing mechanism design considering sharing features is challenging. For example, a capacity-constrained manufacturer or an overcapacity supplier needs to decide whether to join in the sharing considering the cost of the sharing and consumer's consciousness of sustainability comprehensively. In addition, a platform operator needs to design appropriate operational mechanisms particularly the charging mechanisms to balance the relationship between attracting participants of the platform and gaining profits, considering its own development levels and operational goals. Therefore, with regards to production capacity sharing, how to make channel selection decisions and corresponding optimal pricing strategies for manufacturing enterprises and how to design operational mechanisms for platforms from a sustainable operations perspective is important, urgent, and promising. In other words, the aims of this paper are to explore the behaviors of the overcapacity manufacturer and capacity supplier in traditional and sharing manufacturing environments and the ...
