Pricing Vehicle Sharing with Proximity Information

TL;DR

This paper proposes a proximity-based pricing scheme for vehicle sharing that encourages optimal vehicle distribution by linking drop-off prices to the distance from the nearest parked shared vehicle.

Contribution

It introduces a novel pricing mechanism that leverages proximity information to promote socially optimal vehicle distribution in sharing schemes.

Findings

Pricing scheme leads to socially optimal vehicle spread under certain assumptions.

Proximity-based pricing influences user drop-off behavior positively.

The approach aligns individual incentives with social welfare objectives.

Abstract

For vehicle sharing schemes, where drop-off positions are not fixed, we propose a pricing scheme, where the price depends in part on the distance between where a vehicle is being dropped off and where the closest shared vehicle is parked. Under certain restrictive assumptions, we show that this pricing leads to a socially optimal spread of the vehicles within a region.