Analysis of selfish behaviors on door-to-door transport system

Abstract

The selfishness of people sometime degrades the performance of systems in which resources are shared among people. One of the typical examples is a door-to-door transport system. The door-to-door transport system adopts a flexible style of transportation, different from traditional transport systems such as buses and taxis. In the system, several customers ride one transport vehicle all together, and the share-ride transport vehicle visits from door to door. The selfishness of customers may cause the delay of arrivals and the decrease of benefits. However, it is difficult to control the selfishness of people because of their inherent competitive behaviors. Therefore, in this paper we analyze the selfish decision-making processes in the door-to-door transport system on the basis of game theory. The profit relation among people reaches an equilibrium called Nash Equilibrium. However, the equilibrium relation is not optimal for the system in many cases. Therefore, we also show that the degradation of the system resulted from the selfish behaviors can be avoided by changing parameters of the system such as the number of vehicles. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.