Masoud Golalikhani

Abstract
Designing a viable carsharing system in a competitive environment is challenging and often dependent on a myriad of decisions. This paper establishes and presents an integrated conceptual decision-support framework for carsharing systems, encompassing critical decisions that should be made by carsharing organizations and users. To identify the main decisions in a carsharing system, and the inputs and interactions among them, it is crucial to obtain a comprehensive understanding of the current state of the literature as well as the business practices and context. To this aim, a holistic and in-depth literature review is conducted to structure distinct streams of literature and their main findings. Then, we describe some of the key decisions and business practices that are often oversimplified in the literature. Finally, we propose a conceptual decision-support framework that systematizes the interactions between the usually isolated problems in the academic literature and business practices, integrating the perspectives of carsharing organizations and of their users. From the proposed framework, we identify relevant research gaps and ways to bridge them in the future, toward more realistic and applicable research.

Abstract
The carsharing market has never been as competitive as it is now, and during the last years, we have been witnessing a boom in the number of carsharing organizations that appear, often accompanied by an also booming number of companies that disappear. Designing a viable carsharing system is challenging and often depends on local conditions as well as on a myriad of operational decisions that need to be supported by suitable decision support systems. Therefore, carsharing is being increasingly studied in the Operations Management (OM) literature. Nevertheless, often due to the limited transparency of this highly competitive sector and the recency of this business, there is still a "gap of understanding" of the scientific community concerning the business practices and contexts, often resulting in over-simplifications and relevant problems being overlooked. In this paper, we aim to close this "gap of understanding" by describing, conceptualizing, and analyzing the reality of 34 business to-consumer carsharing organizations. With the data collected, we propose a detailed description of the current business practices, such as the ones concerning pricing. From this, we highlight relevant "research insights" and structure all collected data organized by different OM topics, enabling knowledge to be further developed in this field.