Congestion and Incentives in the Age of Driverless Fleets

Federico Boffa, Alessandro Fedele and Alberto Iozzi

No BEMPS67, BEMPS - Bozen Economics & Management Paper Series from Faculty of Economics and Management at the Free University of Bozen

Abstract: Fleets of ridesharing companies, such as Uber and Lyft, are providing an increasing share of passenger travel. Autonomous vehicles will likely only magnify this trend. We analyze the welfare e ects of the transition from a decentralized regime, in which travelers are atomistic and do not internalize the congestion externality, to a centralized regime, where travelers are supplied by a monopolist's fleet. The monopolist can sort travelers across routes based on their congestion disutility, and ration them. A centralized regime is always welfare-reducing when the monopolist chooses not to ration travelers. We then characterize optimal road taxes throughout the transition.

Keywords: Congestion externality; fleets; autonomous vehicles; sorting; rationing (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: R11 R41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: [45 pages]
Date: 2020-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mic, nep-tre and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://repec.unibz.it/bemps67.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Congestion and incentives in the age of driverless fleets (2023)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bzn:wpaper:bemps67

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in BEMPS - Bozen Economics & Management Paper Series from Faculty of Economics and Management at the Free University of Bozen Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by F. Marta L. Di Lascio (marta.dilascio@unibz.it) and Alessandro Fedele (alessandro.fedele@unibz.it).