Dynamic pricing in shared mobility on demand service and its social impacts

Abstract

In this thesis, we formulate and solve a profit maximization problem of shared mobility on demand service operations, and investigate the impact of such operations on performance of transportation system with a carefully designed case study. It is shown that our approach can generate much more profit than other basic strategies, though it has negative impacts on system performance, such as increasing congestion level and reducing capacity provided. We also consider possible regulation schemes on such profit-driven operations, and find that schemes related to the total reduced distance in system can achieve significant improvement. These findings indicate several research directions in future for better designing or regulating shared mobility on demand service from the system perspective.