Abstract
Ticket pricing in public transport usually takes a welfare maximization point of view. Such an approach, however, does not consider fairness in the sense that users of a shared infrastructure should pay for the costs that they generate. We propose an ansatz to determine fair ticket prices that combines concepts from cooperative game theory and linear and integer programming. The ticket pricing problem is considered to be a constrained cost allocation game, which is a generalization of cost allocation games that allows to deal with constraints on output prices and on the formation of coalitions. An application to pricing railway tickets for the intercity network of the Netherlands is presented. The results demonstrate that the fairness of prices can be improved substantially in this way.
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14 December 2017
The authors wish to correct the acknowledgement in page 68 from The work of Nam-Dũng Hoàng is funded by Vietnam National Foundation for Science and Technology Development (NAFOSTED).
Notes
In Hoang (2010) those coalitions are called essential. However this name exists already in cooperative game theory. We therefore use another name to avoid confusion.
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Acknowledgments
We would like to thank three anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments on the paper. The work of Nam-Dũng Hoàng is funded by Vietnam National Foundation for Science and Technology Development (NAFOSTED).
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A preliminary version of this paper appeared in the Proceedings of HPSC 2009 (Borndörfer and Hoang 2012). This journal article introduces better model and algorithms.
A correction to this article is available online at https://doi.org/10.1007/s10479-017-2731-9.
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Borndörfer, R., Hoang, ND. Fair ticket pricing in public transport as a constrained cost allocation game. Ann Oper Res 226, 51–68 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10479-014-1698-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10479-014-1698-z