Finding optimum fares and timetables in a monopoly rail market with heterogeneous passengers
| Authors | |
|---|---|
| Year of publication | 2014 |
| Type | Article in Proceedings |
| Conference | 32nd International Conference Mathematical Methods in Eocnomics Conference Proceedings |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| web | http://mme2014.upol.cz/downloads/MME_2014_Proceedings.pdf |
| Field | Economy |
| Keywords | simulation; rail; monopoly; Salop; fare; timetable |
| Description | This paper presents an agent-based model of passenger rail services. In the model, passengers are uniformly distributed on a circle representing the preferred departure times and passengers on each position of the circle have uniformly distributed reservation prices. The passengers choose the train with the lowest fare plus transport cost, given the sum of fare and transport cost is lower than their reser-vation prices. The paper provides algorithms which can be used for finding fares and timetable of a monopoly train operating company that maximizes its total profit and total welfare in realistic market settings. The efficiency of the algorithms is tested against the analytical solution of the model. The paper finds that the algorithm approximates the theoretical fare, number of trains and their departure times efficiently. |
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