Optimal Tradable Credit Scheme Design with Recommended Credit Price

Abstract

As an interesting research topic in transportation field, tradable credit scheme (TCS) has been extensively explored in the latest decade. Existing studies implicitly assumed that travelers are clear about the equilibrium credit price and make their trips accordingly. However, this may not be the case in reality, since the credit price is endogenously determined by the credit-trading behavior, especially in the early stages after the implementation of a TCS. Considering travelers’ uncertainty on the equilibrium credit price, this paper aims to investigate the impacts of perception error on credit price and how to accommodate such errors by an appropriate scheme design. Transferring the perception error on credit price to a given and fixed value released by central authority, we first investigate the impacts of recommended credit price under a given TCS. The numerical results imply that it is necessary to simultaneously consider the choice of recommended credit price and charging scheme in TCS design. Regarding this, we combine the goals of social welfare and public acceptance of the scheme and propose a bilevel biobjective programming (BLBOP) model, by which the net economic benefit is maximized while the gap between the recommended and realized credit prices is minimized. Through two numerical examples, it is found that the rise in perception variance could intensify the contradiction effect between the two objectives. Additionally, a nonnegligible price gap must be allowed to occur to maintain the effectiveness of a TCS.