Highlights Users are risk-seeking and willing to participate in lotteries, when stakes are low. Different from tolls or credits, raffles are based on voluntary participation. This paper examines the effectiveness of raffles for travel demand management. Utility-based user equilibrium incorporates users’ risks and uncertainties. Flat Raffles outperform one-step tolls when average users are slightly risk-seeking.

    Abstract Raffles have been widely used in commercial markets to influence consumers’ behaviors. Instead of charging users a fee or issuing a credit to users as incentives, the raffle-based scheme incentivizes users to change their choices by giving out credits that are used to enter a lottery. Comparing to tolls or credits, raffles may be less controversial since it is based on voluntary participation. The promises of a raffle-based scheme is that users are more risk-seeking, thus willing to participate in the lottery, when stakes are low. This would particularly fit the traffic management where the cost for a user to change his/her choices may be relatively insignificant comparing to the reward of a raffle. This paper examines the effect of raffle or lotteries for travel demand management, particularly in the morning commute. We establish the utility-based user equilibrium by incorporating risks and uncertainties in users’ choices. A class of Flat Raffle schemes is proposed where a constant lottery winning chance is set for a period of time during the morning commute. We show that a marginal user who is indifferent from participating the lottery or not would exist for arbitrary utility functions. Furthermore, we analytically derive and solve for the equilibrium using exponential utility functions, and subsequently the optimal travel profiles under four potential system management objectives. We find that minimizing the total generalized travel cost (TTC) seems a reasonable goal for an optimal Flat Raffle possibly resulting in approximately minimum commuting duration and minimum total queuing delay at the same time. Under the minimum TTC, there is no queuing delay for the user who is indifferent from participating the lottery or not. Most interestingly, a Flat Raffle scheme works the best and outperforms the optimal one-step toll, when the population is overall slightly risk-seeking. This is particularly appealing since the raffle reward is relatively significant comparing with a not-so-significant cost increase associated with users’ behavioral change.


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    Titel :

    Managing traffic with raffles


    Beteiligte:


    Erscheinungsdatum :

    2019-09-02


    Format / Umfang :

    20 pages




    Medientyp :

    Aufsatz (Zeitschrift)


    Format :

    Elektronische Ressource


    Sprache :

    Englisch