Game Theory to Study Interactions between Mobility Stakeholders

Abstract: Increasing urbanization and exacerbation of sustainability goals threaten the operational efficiency of current transportation systems and confront cities with complex choices with huge impact on future generations. At the same time, the rise of private, profit-maximizing Mobility Service Providers leveraging public resources, such as ride-hailing companies, entangles current regulation schemes. This calls for tools to study such complex socio-technical problems. In this paper, we provide a game-theoretic framework to study interactions between stakeholders of the mobility ecosystem, modeling regulatory aspects such as taxes and public transport prices, as well as operational matters for Mobility Service Providers such as pricing strategy, fleet sizing, and vehicle design. Our framework is modular and can readily accommodate different types of Mobility Service Providers, actions of municipalities, and low-level models of customers choices in the mobility system. Through both an analytical and a numerical case study for the city of Berlin, Germany, we showcase the ability of our framework to compute equilibria of the problem, to study fundamental tradeoffs, and to inform stakeholders and policy makers on the effects of interventions. Among others, we show tradeoffs between customers satisfaction, environmental impact, and public revenue, as well as the impact of strategic decisions on these metrics.