Autonomous vehicles (AVs) are attractive for ride service providers (RSPs) in part because they eliminate the need to compete for human drivers. We investigate a scenario where two RSPs with AVs compete for customers. We model the problem as a game where the RSPs select prices for each origin-destination pair over multiple time periods in an underlying graph representing the customers' desired trips. Each RSP also decides the number of AVs to be stationed at each node at each time period to serve the customers' demands. The number of customers who avail of the service of an RSP depends on the price selected by the RSP and its competitor. Since the strategy choices available to an RSP depends on its competitor, we seek to compute a Generalized Nash equilibrium (GNE). We show that there may be multiple GNEs. However, when an RSP selects prices in order to deter its competitor when it is not serving a source-destination pair, the game has a potential function and admits a unique GNE. We also compare the competitive prices with a monopoly price where only one RSP is in the market. Numerically, we show that if a network consists of two equal-size spatial clusters of demand where the demand between clusters is low, the RSPs may partition the market, i.e, one cluster is served by only one RSP. Hence, the competitive price may become close to the monopoly price.
The presence of uncertainties in the ride-hailing market complicates the pricing strategies of on-demand platforms that compete each other to offer a mobility service while striving to maximize their profit. Looking at this problem as a stochastic generalized Nash equilibrium problem (SGNEP), we design a distributed, stochastic equilibrium seeking algorithm with Tikhonov regularization to find an optimal pricing strategy. Remarkably, the proposed iterative scheme does not require an increasing (possibly infinite) number of samples of the random variable to perform the stochastic approximation,…
Autonomous vehicles will be an integral part of ride-sharing services in the future. This setting differs from traditional ride-sharing marketplaces because of the absence of the supply side (drivers). However, it has far-reaching consequences because in addition to pricing, players now have to make decisions on how to distribute fleets across network locations and re-balance vehicles in order to serve future demand. In this paper, we explore a duopoly setting in the ride-sharing marketplace where the players have fully autonomous fleets. Each ride-service provider (RSP)'s prices depend on the…
This paper investigates the incentives of mobile network operators (MNOs) for acquiring additional spectrum to offer mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs) and thereby inviting competition for a common pool of end users (EUs). We consider a base case and two generalizations: (i) one MNO and one MVNO, (ii) one MNO, one MVNO and an outside option, and (iii) two MNOs and one MVNO. In each of these cases, we model the interactions of the service providers (SPs) using a sequential game, identify when the Subgame Perfect Nash Equilibrium (SPNE) exists, when it is unique and characterize the SPNE w…
This paper investigates the incentives of mobile network operators (MNOs) for acquiring additional spectrum to offer mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs) and thereby inviting competition for a common pool of end users (EUs). We consider interactions between two service providers, an MNO and an MVNO, when the EUs 1) must choose one of them 2) have the option to defect to an outside option should the SP duo offer unsatisfactory access fees or qualities of service. We formulate a multi-stage hybrid of cooperative bargaining and non-cooperative games in which the two SPs jointly determine thei…
A Markovian Traffic Equilibrium Model for Ride-Hailing
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Massachusetts Amherst（麻省大学阿默斯特分校土木与环境工程系）；Department of Industrial Engineering, Tsinghua University（清华大学工业工程系）；Department of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research, University of California, Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校工业工程与运筹学系）
Recently, some transportation service providers attempt to integrate the ride services offered by multiple independent ride-sourcing platforms, and passengers are able to request ride through such third-party integrators or connectors and receive service from any one of the platforms. This novel business model, termed as third-party platform-integration in this paper, has potentials to alleviate the cost of market fragmentation due to the demand splitting among multiple platforms. While most existing studies focus on the operation strategies for one single monopolist platform, much less is kno…
We analyse a coalition formation game between strategic service providers of a congestible service. The key novelty of our formulation is that it is a constant sum game, i.e., the total payoff across all service providers (or coalitions of providers) is fixed, and dictated by the total size of the market. The game thus captures the tension between resource pooling (to benefit from the resulting statistical economies of scale) and competition between coalitions over market share. In a departure from the prior literature on resource pooling for congestible services, we show that the grand coalit…
Heterogeneous Data Game: Characterizing the Model Competition Across Multiple Data Sources
Key Laboratory of Interdisciplinary Research of Computation and Economics, Institute for Theoretical Computer Science, Shanghai University of Finance and Economics（计算与经济学交叉研究重点实验室，理论计算机科学研究所，上海金融学院）；College of Management and Economics, Tianjin University（管理学院，天津大学）；School of Economics and Management, Tsinghua University（经济管理学院，清华大学）
提出 Heterogeneous Data Game 博弈论框架，刻画多个 ML 提供商跨异构数据源的竞争，并分析纯纳什均衡的存在性、同构与异构形态及市场影响因素。
We study the effects of allowing paid prioritization arrangements in a market with content provider (CP) competition. We consider competing CPs who pay prioritization fees to a monopolistic ISP so as to offset the ISP's cost for investing in infrastructure to support fast lanes. Unlike prior works, our proposed model of users' content consumption accounts for multi-purchasing (i.e., users simultaneously subscribing to more than one CP). This model allows us to account for the "attention" received by each CP, and consequently to draw a contrast between how subscription-revenues and ad-revenues …
Caching as a Service: Small-cell Caching Mechanism Design for Service Providers
无线网络虚拟化已经被公认为通过解耦系统的功能并实现基础设施和频谱即服务来提高无线网络的灵活性的方式。最近的研究表明，缓存提供了一个更好的性能，以满足移动用户的内容请求。在本文中，我们提出了移动网络中的\emph{caching can be applied as a service}，即，不同的服务提供商（SP）将它们的内容缓存在由移动网络运营商（MNO）拥有的无线设施的存储器中。具体而言，我们专注于\emph{small-cell networks}的场景，其中启用缓存的小小区基站（SBS）是缓存内容的设施。针对多个服务提供商之间的存储竞争问题，设计了一种基于多目标拍卖的存储竞争机制，该机制充分考虑了系统参数的时变性和内容替换的频繁性。仿真结果表明，我们的解决方案导致一个令人满意的结果。
We study a two-sided network investment game consisting of two sets of players, called providers and users. The game is set in two stages. In the first stage, providers aim to maximize their profit by investing in bandwidth of cloud computing services. The investments of the providers yield a set of usable services for the users. In the second stage, each user wants to process a task and therefore selects a bundle of services so as to minimize the total processing time. We assume the total processing time to be separable over the chosen services and the processing time of each service to depen…
We study a problem inspired by regulated health insurance markets, such as those created by the government in the Affordable Care Act Exchanges or by employers when they contract with private insurers to provide plans for their employees. The market regulator can choose to do nothing, running a Free Market, or can exercise her regulatory power by limiting the entry of providers (decreasing consumer welfare by limiting options, but also decreasing revenue via enhanced competition). We investigate whether limiting entry increases or decreases the utility (welfare minus revenue) of the consumers …
LTE-U is an extension of the Long Term Evolution (LTE) standard for operation in unlicensed spectrum. LTE-U differs from WiFi, the predominant technology used in unlicensed spectrum in that it utilizes a duty cycle mode for accessing the spectrum and allows for a more seamless integration with LTE deployments in licensed spectrum. There have been a number of technical studies on the co-existence of LTE-U and WiFi in unlicensed spectrum In this paper, we instead investigate the impact of such a technology from an economic perspective. We consider a model in which an incumbent service provider (…
