Market Economy of Trips

Team

Dimitris Papanikolaou and Kent Larson

Project Brief

We are developing a new strategy to create autonomous self-organizing vehicle sharing systems that uses incentive mechanisms (dynamic pricing) to smooth demand imbalances, and an interactive graphical user interface to effectively communicate location-based price information. Prices adjust dynamically to parking needs, incentivizing users to drive vehicles to stations with too few vehicles, while discouraging arrivals to stations with excess vehicles.

This research explains how users make decisions in dynamically priced mobility systems, under which circumstances their actions may make up a self-regulating economy, and how this economy dynamically performs in different demand patterns. To address these issues we develop a computational framework using System Dynamics, Urban Economics, and Game Theory that models system behavior which will be used to determine optimum pricing policy, fleet size, and density of parking stations for having a stable yet profitable system.