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Recent research in the social sciences has identified situations in which small changes in the way that information is provided to consumers can have large aggregate effects on behavior. This has been promoted in popular media in areas of public health and wellness, but its application to other areas has not been broadly studied. This paper presents a simple model which expresses the effect of providing commuters with carefully-curated information regarding aggregate traffic “slowdowns” on the various roads in a transportation network. Much of the work on providing information to commuters focuses specifically on travel-time information. However, the model in the present paper allows a system planner to provide slowdown information as well; that is, commuters are additionally told how much slower each route is as compared to its uncongested state. We show that providing this additional information can improve equilibrium routing efficiency when compared to the case when commuters are only given information about travel time, but that these improvements in congestion are not universal. That is, transportation networks exist on which any provision of slowdown information can harm equilibrium congestion. In addition, this paper illuminates a deep connection between the effects of commuter slowdown-sensitivity and the study of marginal-cost pricing and altruism in congestion games.
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Optimal capacity sizing of park‐and‐ride lots with information aware commuters
We study capacity sizing of park‐and‐ride lots that offer services to commuters sensitive to congestion and parking availability information. The goal is to determine parking lot capacities that maximize the total social welfare for commuters whose parking lot choices are predicted using the multinomial logit model. We formulate the problem as a nonconvex nonlinear program that involves a lower and an upper bound on each lot's capacity, and a fixed‐point constraint reflecting the effects of parking information and congestion on commuters' lot choices. We show that except for at most one lot, the optimal capacity of each lot takes one of three possible values. Based on analytical results, we develop a one‐variable search algorithm to solve the model. We learn from numerical results that the optimal capacity of a lot with a high intrinsic utility tends to be equal to the upper bound. By contrast, a lot with a low or moderate‐sized intrinsic utility tends to attain an optimal capacity on its effective lower bound. We evaluate the performance of the optimal solution under different choice scenarios of commuters who are shared with real‐time parking information. We learn that commuters are better off in an average choice scenario when both the effects of parking information and congestion are considered in the model than when either effect is ignored from the model.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2127779
- PAR ID:
- 10509395
- Publisher / Repository:
- Wiley
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Production and Operations Management
- Volume:
- 32
- Issue:
- 11
- ISSN:
- 1059-1478
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 3614 to 3633
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1111/poms.14053
