The Market Economy of Trips @ International Conference of System Dynamics - ISD'11 (original) (raw)
The Market Economy of Trips (MET) investigates the potential of using market incentive mechanisms and a visual information system to create sustainable, self-organizing, one-way vehicle sharing systems. That is systems requiring minimum central intervention. One-way vehicle sharing systems are distributed urban mobility networks of vehicles and parking stations that allow users to conveniently pick up a vehicle from any station and drop it off to any other station. Popular examples are bike sharing programs however this trend is rapidly entering automobile markets. Despite their great convenience vehicle sharing systems have drawbacks too. Due to asymmetric demand patterns, eventually all vehicles are ending at the stations with no demand. This inventory imbalance, not only decreases through- put, but it furthermore increases trip time as drivers search for parking spaces. Existing policies redistribute manually vehicles, which is a complex, inefficient, and highly unsustainable solution. As a consequence, many vehicle sharing systems end up wasting more resources for sustaining their performance than the value of the service they provide. We explore a new strategy to create autonomous self-organizing vehicle sharing systems that uses price incentives to smooth demand imbalances, and an interactive graphical user interface to intuitively communicate location-based price information to the users. Similarly to a market economy, prices adjust dynamically to parking needs incentivizing users to drive vehicles to stations that mostly need them while discouraging arrivals to stations that don’t need them. In this paper we explain decision-making in dynamically priced mobility systems, explore the conditions under which a stable equilibrium state may exist, and if so, whether local price calculation and visual perception of the price landscape is sufficient to bring it. Is there a pricing policy that can make the system self-sustaining such that the funds from its overpaying users are enough to reward its underpaying users? How efficient can a dynamically priced vehicle sharing system be? To address these questions we develop and conduct a game experiment to empirically evaluate users’ visual perception of payoffs, and a computational framework using System Dynamics and Urban Economics, to explore the lim- its of efficiency of MET under different demand patterns, pricing policies and population’s income distribution.
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