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.
This paper provides efficient solutions to maximize profit for commercial ridesharing services, under a pricing model with detour-based discounts for passengers. We propose greedy heuristics for real-time ride matching that offer different trade-offs between optimality and speed. Simulations on New York City (NYC) taxi trip data show that our heuristics are up to 90% optimal and 10^5 times faster than the (necessarily) exponential-time optimal algorithm. Commercial ridesharing service providers generate significant savings by matching multiple ride requests using heuristic methods. The resulti…
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…
The data sponsored scheme allows the content provider to cover parts of the cellular data costs for mobile users. Thus the content service becomes appealing to more users and potentially generates more profit gain to the content provider. In this paper, we consider a sponsored data market with a monopoly network service provider, a single content provider, and multiple users. In particular, we model the interactions of three entities as a two-stage Stackelberg game, where the service provider and content provider act as the leaders determining the pricing and sponsoring strategies, respectivel…
University of California, Irvine（加州大学欧文分校）；Masdar Institute of Science and Technology（马斯达尔科学技术研究所）
With proper management, Autonomous Mobility-on-Demand (AMoD) systems have great potential to satisfy the transport demands of urban populations by providing safe, convenient, and affordable ridesharing services. Meanwhile, such systems can substantially decrease private car ownership and use, and thus significantly reduce traffic congestion, energy consumption, and carbon emissions. To achieve this objective, an AMoD system requires private information about the demand from passengers. However, due to self-interestedness, passengers are unlikely to cooperate with the service providers in this …
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…
On-demand transport services in the form of dial-a-ride and taxis are crucial parts of the transport infrastructure in all major cities. However, not all on-demand transport services are equal. In particular, not-for-profit dial-a-ride services with coordinated drivers significantly differ from profit-motivated taxi services with uncoordinated drivers. As such, there are two key threads of research for efficient scheduling, routing, and pricing for passengers: dial-a-ride services (first thread); and taxi services (second thread). Unfortunately, there has been only limited development of algor…
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。
Cellular has always relied on static deployments for providing wireless access. However, even the emerging fifth-generation (5G) networks may face difficulty in supporting the increased traffic demand with rigid, fixed infrastructure without substantial over-provisioning. This is particularly true for spontaneous large-scale events that require service providers to augment capacity of their networks quickly. Today, the use of aerial devices equipped with high-rate radio access capabilities has the potential to offer the much needed "on-demand" capacity boost. Conversely, it also threatens to r…
This paper models a non-cooperative game between two EV charging stations. One is a fixed-power charging station purchasing electricity from the grid at wholesale price and reselling the energy to EV owners at a higher retail price; the other is regulation-providing and varies the recharging power level of its clients to provide regulation services to the grid, so its profit comes from both EV owners (who buy energy) and the grid (which pays for regulation services). Users are reluctant to charging power variations and prefer shorter overall charging times, hence regulation-providing charging …
Can noncooperative behaviour of merchants lead to a market split that prima facie seems anticompetitive? We introduce a model in which service providers, with ISPs being the main example, aim at optimizing the number of customers using their services, while customers aim at choosing service providers with low customer load (high bandwidth per subscriber, for ISPs). Each service provider chooses between a variety of levels of service (latencies, for ISPs), and as long as it does not lose customers, aims at minimizing its level of service; the minimum level of service required to satisfy a custo…
We consider the economics of the interaction between Mobile Virtual Network Operators (MVNOs) and Mobile Network Operators (MNOs). We investigate the incentives of an MNO for offering some of her resources to an MVNO instead of using the resources for her own End-Users (EUs). We consider a market with one MNO and one MVNO, and a continuum of undecided EUs. Two cases for EUs are considered: (i) when EUs need to choose either the MNO or the MVNO, and (ii) when EUs have an outside option. In each of these cases, we consider a non-cooperative framework of sequential game and a cooperative framewor…
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 …
Wireless network virtualization has been well recognized as a way to improve the flexibility of wireless networks by decoupling the functionality of the system and implementing infrastructure and spectrum as services. Recent studies have shown that caching provides a better performance to serve the content requests from mobile users. In this paper, we propose that \emph{caching can be applied as a service} in mobile networks, i.e., different service providers (SPs) cache their contents in the storages of wireless facilities that owned by mobile network operators (MNOs). Specifically, we focus …
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 …
There has been growing interest in increasing the amount of radio spectrum available for unlicensed broad-band wireless access. That includes "prime" spectrum at lower frequencies, which is also suitable for wide area coverage by licensed cellular providers. While additional unlicensed spectrum would allow for market expansion, it could influence competition among providers and increase congestion (interference) among consumers of wireless services. We study the value (social welfare and consumer surplus) obtained by adding unlicensed spectrum to an existing allocation of licensed spectrum amo…
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 (…
