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Robust Toll Pricing

Author

Listed:
  • Sonali Sen Gupta
  • Trivikram Dokka Venkata Satyanaraya
  • Alain Zemkoho
  • Fabrice Talla Nobibon

Abstract

We study a robust toll pricing problem where toll setters and users have different level of information when taking their decisions. Toll setters do not have full information on the costs of the network and rely on historical information when determining toll rates, whereas users decide on the path to use from origin to destination knowing toll rates and having, in addition, more accurate traffic data. In this work, we first consider a single origin-destination parallel network and formulate the robust toll pricing problem as a distributionally robust optimization problem, for which we develop an exact algorithm based on a mixed-integer programming formulation and a heuristic based on two-point support distribution. We further extend our formulations to more general networks and show how our algorithms can be adapted for the general networks. Finally, we illustrate the usefulness of our approach by means of numerical experiments both on randomly generated networks and on the road network of the city of Chicago.

Suggested Citation

  • Sonali Sen Gupta & Trivikram Dokka Venkata Satyanaraya & Alain Zemkoho & Fabrice Talla Nobibon, 2017. "Robust Toll Pricing," Working Papers 194217799, Lancaster University Management School, Economics Department.
    • Handle: RePEc:lan:wpaper:194217799
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    File URL: http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/media/lancaster-university/content-assets/documents/lums/economics/working-papers/LancasterWP2017_023.pdf
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    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Dirk Bergemann & Karl Schlag, 2012. "Robust Monopoly Pricing," World Scientific Book Chapters, in: Robust Mechanism Design The Role of Private Information and Higher Order Beliefs, chapter 13, pages 417-441, World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd..
    2. Omar Besbes & Assaf Zeevi, 2009. "Dynamic Pricing Without Knowing the Demand Function: Risk Bounds and Near-Optimal Algorithms," Operations Research, INFORMS, vol. 57(6), pages 1407-1420, December.
    3. Dirk Bergemann & Karl H. Schlag, 2012. "Pricing Without Priors," World Scientific Book Chapters, in: Robust Mechanism Design The Role of Private Information and Higher Order Beliefs, chapter 12, pages 405-415, World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd..
    4. Alizadeh, S.M. & Marcotte, P. & Savard, G., 2013. "Two-stage stochastic bilevel programming over a transportation network," Transportation Research Part B: Methodological, Elsevier, vol. 58(C), pages 92-105.
    5. Mustapha Bouhtou & Stan van Hoesel & Anton F. van der Kraaij & Jean-Luc Lutton, 2007. "Tariff Optimization in Networks," INFORMS Journal on Computing, INFORMS, vol. 19(3), pages 458-469, August.
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