信息管理与商业智能系讲座（6月30日）

Despite rapid growth in electric vehicle (EV) adoption, EV charging networks suffer from persistent underutilization during off-peak hours and congestion at peak times. This inefficiency arises not solely from infrastructure scarcity but from behavioral market failures, particularly due to range anxiety. To cope with challenges in maintaining infrastructure availability, charging platforms may embrace platform interoperability, i.e., a strategy that allows competing EV charging platforms to share infrastructure access. However, it is not clear whether such a strategy benefits the platform and improves the infrastructure’s utilization efficiency in the competitive environment, especially given user behavioral issues such as range anxiety. In this study, we investigate a quasi-experimental context in China, where major EV charging platforms initiated a roaming agreement in select cities to implement interoperability, allowing competing stations to be listed and transacted across participating platforms. Drawing on proprietary data from one of the largest charging platforms in China, we find that the implementation of interoperability significantly reshaped user behavior: Users tend to charge at lower states of charge, engage in less intensive but more frequent charging sessions as needed, and shift charging from peak periods to off-peak periods, all of which indicate reduced range anxiety. In addition, their charging patterns became more stable and routinized following interoperability. At the station level, interoperability led to the use of fewer charging piles (indicating reduced congestion) and a shift in demand from peak to off-peak hours. This improvement in utilization efficiency contributes to better business outcomes, such as an increased revenue-to-cost ratio. We further document how this reduced range anxiety is associated with the observed improvements in utilization efficiency, which in turn facilitates load balancing across stations within the city. Therefore, this study offers a novel insight on how platform interoperability may benefit even in the competitive context, and contributes to multiple streams of literature on platform strategy, coopetition, and EV charging ecosystems. Ling Xue is the Terry College of Business Alumni Board Distinguished Professor of Management Information Systems at Terry College of Business, University of Georgia. He earned his PhD in Information Systems from the University of Texas at Austin. His research expertise lies at the intersection of digital technology and decentralized governance. He delves into the socio-technical aspects within various digital contexts, such as digital platforms, open-source communities, blockchain ecosystems, AI development and deployment phenomena, and traditional corporate IT environments. His research has been published in research journals in various business disciplines, including Information Systems Research (ISR), Management Information Systems Quarterly (MISQ), Academy of Management Journal (AMJ), Journal of Operations Management (JOM), Production and Operations Management (POM), and Journal of Management Information Systems (JMIS). He is currently an associate editor at ISR, a senior editor at POM, and a founding department editor (the Platform and Sharing Economy department) at Decision Science Journal (DSJ). He was an associate editor of MISQ. He has served as the president and the secretary of treasury of E-Business Section of INFORMS, and co-chaired the 2025 Conference of Information Systems and Technology (CIST 2025).