An Incentive Mechanism for Private Parking-Sharing Programs in an Imperfect Information Setting

Abstract

This paper proposes a matching-and-pricing mechanism for a drivers’ demand-reporting problem in parking-sharing programs in which owners share their private parking slots with drivers. We generate a driver-slot matching solution by a centralized assignment procedure according to the demand and supply information reported by drivers and owners, respectively, and determine truth-telling pricing by the Vickrey-Clark-Grove mechanism. We show that under the assumption that drivers do not know with certainty whether other drivers will show up to compete for the parking slots, the mechanism proposed in this paper induces drivers to truthfully report their private information of the travel plans and guarantees three other desirable properties: participation of drivers and slot owners, optimal system efficiency, and balance of the system’s budget. We further extend these results to two dynamic situations. Finally, the results of the numerical experiments based on real-world data demonstrate the performance of the mechanism. History: This paper has been accepted for the Service Science Special Issue on Innovation in Transportation-Enabled Urban Services. Funding: This work was partially funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [Grants 71972026, 72192805, and 71971044], the Major Program of National Social Science Foundation of China [Grant 20&ZD084], and the Leading Talent Program of Guangdong Province [Grant 2016LJ06D703]. Supplemental Material: The online supplement is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/serv.2022.0303 .