Truthful Mechanism for private parking slots sharing problem
Abstract
Parking presents a major challenge in world-wide metropolitans, due to the fact that the
demand for parking far exceeds the supply in metropolitans. Motivated by industrial practice and existing
literature, this study proposes a real-time reservation and pricing mechanism for a shared parking service
system. In our designed a real-time reservation system, drivers looking for slots around a central area are
matched with suitable parking slots considering restricts of drivers’ travels and the availability of the
shared parking slots. To achieve an optimal system efficiency, not only an optimal matching solution but
also flexible trip plans for drivers need to schedule. To efficiently solve the matching and scheduling
formulation, a pseudo-polynomial heuristic algorithm is developed in this study. We then exam a
common time-based pricing method charging drivers based on a fixed price per time unite under an
incomplete information setting. It is shown that such a pricing method induces self-interested divers’
misreporting of their demands and lead to the loss of the system efficiency. Therefore, a novel truthful
pricing method is proposed to avoid drivers from misreporting as well as satisfy some important
economic properties in mechanism design theory.