Design and Stability Analysis of a Shared Mobility Market (2011.09025v1)

Abstract: In recent years, we have witnessed a remarkable surge of usage in shared vehicles in our cities. Shared mobility offers a future of no congestion in busy city roads with increasing populations of travelers, passengers, and drivers. Given the behavioral decision-making of travelers and the shared vehicles' operators, however, the question is "how can we ensure a socially-acceptable assignment between travelers and vehicles?" In other words, how can we design a shared mobility system that assigns each traveler to the "right" vehicle? In this paper, we design a shared mobility market consisted of travelers and vehicles in a transportation network. We formulate a linear programming problem and derive the optimal assignment between travelers and vehicles. In addition, we provide the necessary and sufficient conditions for the stable traveler-vehicle profit allocation. Our goal is twofold: maximize the social welfare of all travelers with the optimal assignment while ensuring the feasibility and stability of the traveler-vehicle profit allocation while respecting the decision-making of both the travelers and the vehicles' operators.