Electric vehicle charging infrastructure investment strategy analysis: State-owned versus private parking lots

This paper analytically studies the optimal charging infrastructure investment decisions in parking lots with state-owned firms and private firms, which aims to alleviate range anxiety and facilitate the mass adoption of electric vehicles. The investment decisions are made based on the rational choice in the short term and are assumed to be static. However, the investment in charging infrastructure is a long-term strategy and the decisions might evolve over time. As a result, an evolutionary game theoretic approach is proposed to analytically explore the instability of the investment decisions and derive the optimal investment strategies. We first construct a basic model with a payoff matrix of public and private parking lots and formulate the dynamic replicator equations to find the equilibrium points. We further explore the evolutionary stable strategy (ESS) with its conditions, and analyze the impact of key factors on the strategy evolution. In the basic model, we find that the investment ratio of the state-owned firms and private firms is crucial to the ESS and its original parking revenue has no impact on the investment decisions. To discover the impact of the uncertainty of investments, we next reformulate the model and extend the original payoff matrix by incorporating the perceived value function based on prospect theory. The ESS and its relevant conditions are also derived. We observe that two models have the same ESS in most cases when there is a marked difference in their profitability. When the difference in their profitability is small, the perceived return on investment plays a pivotal role in their investment decisions. Finally, managerial implications are discussed.