Mechanism Design with Predicted Task Revenue for Bike Sharing Systems

TL;DR

This paper introduces TruPreTar, a novel incentive mechanism for bike-sharing systems that leverages predicted task revenues to effectively rebalance bikes, ensuring truthfulness, budget feasibility, and near-optimal revenue.

Contribution

The paper proposes TruPreTar, an incentive mechanism that incorporates predicted revenues into bike rebalancing, with proven economic properties and strong theoretical guarantees.

Findings

TruPreTar achieves 2-approximation to the optimal revenue.

The mechanism maintains truthfulness and budget feasibility.

Experimental results show superior performance over benchmarks.

Abstract

Bike sharing systems have been widely deployed around the world in recent years. A core problem in such systems is to reposition the bikes so that the distribution of bike supply is reshaped to better match the dynamic bike demand. When the bike-sharing company or platform is able to predict the revenue of each reposition task based on historic data, an additional constraint is to cap the payment for each task below its predicted revenue. In this paper, we propose an incentive mechanism called {\em TruPreTar} to incentivize users to park bicycles at locations desired by the platform toward rebalancing supply and demand. TruPreTar possesses four important economic and computational properties such as truthfulness and budget feasibility. Furthermore, we prove that even when the payment budget is tight, the total revenue still exceeds or equals the budget. Otherwise, TruPreTar achieves 2-approximation as compared to the optimal (revenue-maximizing) solution, which is close to the lower bound of at least $\sqrt{2}$ that we also prove. Using an industrial dataset obtained from a large bike-sharing company, our experiments show that TruPreTar is effective in rebalancing bike supply and demand and, as a result, generates high revenue that outperforms several benchmark mechanisms.