• Journal of the Korean Operations Research and Management Science Society
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• v.34 no.4
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• pp.123-138
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• 2009

This study examined the first- and second-best pricing by stable dynamics in congested transportation networks. Stable dynamics, suggested by Nesterov and de Palma (2003), is a new model which describes and provides a stable state of congestion in urban transportation networks. The first-best pricing in user equilibrium models introduces user-equilibrium in the system-equilibrium by tolling the difference between the marginal social cost and the marginal private cost on each link. Nevertheless, the second-best pricing, which levies the toll on some, but not all, links, is relevant from the practical point of view. In comparison with the user equilibrium model, the stable dynamic model provides a solution equivalent to system-equilibrium if it is focused on link flows. Therefore the toll interval on each link, which keeps up the system-equilibrium, is more meaningful than the first-best pricing. In addition, the second-best pricing in stable dynamic models is the same as the first-best pricing since the toll interval is separately given by each link. As an effect of congestion pricing in stable dynamic models, we can remove the inefficiency of the network with inefficient Braess links by levying a toll on the Braess link. We present a numerical example applied to the network with 6 nodes and 9 links, including 2 Braess links.

• The Journal of The Korea Institute of Intelligent Transport Systems
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• v.7 no.5
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• pp.159-169
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• 2008

The aim of this paper is to research the changes of social welfare by internalizing external cost, especially the maintenance cost. Main target of this paper is the Cheonan$\sim$Nonsan Line, where private capital highway, national highway and local road are competing against each other. Considering the realistic difficulties in applying the First Best pricing, this paper applied the Second Best pricing, applying the maintenance cost, in lieu of the already mentioned. The demand functions of the toll roads were built through regression analysis. By reflecting the maintenance cost to the toll fee, It was able to confirm the variation of social welfare deriving from the traffic assign change but also the aspects of toll revenue at the same time. Result of applying the Second Best pricing shows merely a small change in social welfare. However, in the aspect of finance, it is analyzed that there will be about 13 billion won worth of financial effectiveness which will contribute to the reduction of the national financial support.

• Journal of Korean Society of Transportation
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• v.8 no.1
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• pp.17-24
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• 1990

The first-best pricing rule which achieves economic efficiency is to equate price with marginal cost. Since public transport demand is derived from some other demand, the user cost as well as the producer cost are considered in its pricing. The optimal price is derived from a derivative of the total social cost with respect to demand. In case of the bus, if there is enough capacity for demand increase, the optimal price is determined by the marginal producer cost resulting from bus sped decrease and by the marginal user cost resulting from journey time increase. Both are caused by boarding and fare collecting time of an additional passenger. Because of the budget constraints, the marginal cost pricing cannot be applied in practice. Then price discrimination as the second-best pricing is introduced. The Ramsey pricing, to charge different prices for different demand elasticities, and nonuniform prices such as travelcards can be applied. However, there is practical difficulty in implementing these prices because of great informational requirements, the costs of administration and the ease to users.

• Journal of Korean Society of Transportation
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• v.27 no.2
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• pp.145-155
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• 2009

This paper compares the relative performances of area and cordon tolls as opposed to the first-best congestion tolls with respect to alleviation of traffic congestion and social welfare. The comparison is done in the monocentric city where all the jobs are located at the city center. The study shows that the size of charging zones is similar in the two second-bests, but that the optimal toll level is higher in area pricing than in cordon pricing. Area pricing schemes turn out to perform better than cordon pricing schemes as measured by average speeds and daily average travel time. Accordingly, the former is shown to increase the social welfare more than the latter. In the case of the cordon tolls, the residents at the charging zones are exempted from the tolls. In this way, cordon tolls invite people into the most congested areas over the optimal level while partially negating the whole spirit of the congestion tolls.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.16 no.7
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• pp.146-153
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• 2016

This work studies the equilibrium behavior of customers and optimal pricing strategies of the sever in a continuous-time M/M/1 queueing system. In this work, we consider two pricing models. The first one is called the ex-ante payment scheme where the server charges a flat price for all services, and the second one is called the ex-post payment scheme where the server charges a price that is proportional to the time a customer spends in the system. In each pricing model, the departing customer receives the reward that is inversely proportional to his/her sojourn time. The server should make the optimal pricing decisions in order to maximize its expected profit per unit time in each payment scheme. This work also investigates customer's equilibrium joining or balking behaviors under server's optimal pricing strategies. Numerical experiments are conducted to help the server best select one between two pricing models.

• Journal of Korean Society of Transportation
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• v.32 no.6
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• pp.675-685
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• 2014

This paper develops a differentiated pricing strategy over each segment of expressways based on the second-best pricing method for reducing congestion. To this end, a bi-level problem is proposed, in which the upper level of the model is formulated to determine toll level of each segment for minimizing traffic congestion, whereas the lower level of the model is formulated as a variable demand assignment problem. The sensitivity analysis based algorithm is took placed to find optimal solutions of upper level model. An application of the proposed model uses the modified Sioux-Falls network. The results show that the segment-based differentiated pricing strategy performs better than the existing uniform pricing strategy in reducing traffic congestion. This study can be applied as a demand management method to relieve disutility of excessively congested segments of expressways.

• Journal of the Korean Operations Research and Management Science Society
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• v.3 no.1
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• pp.31-46
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• 1978

Consider a time interval during which the demand for trips is fixed (e.g. the rush hour period). The traveller has a choice between various public modes, whose travel times and fares are fixed, and the automobile mode, for which travel time and cost depend on the volume of traffic flow on those roads, which are subject to congestion. We consider the equilibrium in terms of a representative travellerm, who choses for any trip the mode and route with the least combined money and time cost. When several (parallel) model or routes are chosen, then the combined cost of money and time must be equal among these. Our problem is first, to find the optimal flows of cars and of public mode carriers on the various links of their networks and second the optimal fares for trips by the variousmodes. The object is to minimize the total operating costs of the carriers and car plus the total time costs to travellers. The optimal fares are related to, but not identical with the dual variables of the underlying Nonlinear Program. They are equal to these dual variables only in the case, when congestion tolls on trips or on the use of specific roads are collected from automobile users. When such tolls are not collected, they must be passed on as subsidies to travellers using competing modes. The optimal fares of public modes are then reduced by the amounts of these subsidies. Note that subsidies are not a flat payment to public carriers, but are calculated on the basis of tickets sold. Fares and subsidies depend in general on tile period considered. They will be higher during periods of higher demand. When the assumption of fixed trip demand is relaxed, this tare system is no longer best, but only second best since too much traffic will, in general, be generated. The Free Rider Theorem states the following : Suppose road tolls can be charged, so that a best pricing system for public modes is posssible. Then there may exist free rides on some routes and modes, but never on a complete round trip.

• Journal of Korean Society of Transportation
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• v.20 no.4
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• pp.95-107
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• 2002

Congestion and increasing returns to scale in the use of and in the provision of transportation facilities have been biggest challenges to policy makers. In order to counter these problems and thereby to promote economic efficiency, optimal congestion tax and marginal cost pricing are separately and strongly recommended for each case. In this paper, however, we show that they are valid only in Partial equilibrium context in which only the corresponding market is considered. We set up a formal general equilibrium model and prove that the recommended policies are not in general effective. We continue to give particular examples which show the invalidity of each policy and continue to show that in the same examples, there exist better but unconventional policies. Based on these findings we strongly suggest to employ quantify restricting policy measure or to find second-best pricing policies.

• Journal of the Korean Operations Research and Management Science Society
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• v.35 no.4
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• pp.17-31
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• 2010

This study investigates two-stage return policy and recycling issues in an e-marketplace supply chain consisting of consumers, a retailer and a manufacturer. The manufacturer, a focal company in the e-marketplace supply chain, considers the recycling of commercial returns so offers the retailer a buy-back contract of which transfer payment consists of a wholesale price and a buy-back price. Then, under the given contract offer, the retailer determines a selling price and a return policy to control consumers' demand and return requests. We consider the retailer's opportunistic behavior and supply chain coordination issues based on the principal-agent paradigm. We compare the first-best and second-best optima and conduct comparative static analyses to evaluate the performance results of the buy-back contract and provide important managerial implications.

• Asia pacific journal of information systems
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• v.17 no.4
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• pp.113-132
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• 2007

Price rigidity involves prices that do not change with the regularity predicted by standard economic theory. It is of long-standing interest for firms, industries and the economy as a whole. However, due to the difficulty of measuring price rigidity and price adjustments directly, only a few studies have attempted to provide empirical evidence for explanatory theories from Economics and Marketing. This paper proposes and validates a research model to examine different theories of price rigidity and to predict what variables can explain the observed empirical regularities and variations in price adjustment patterns of Internet-based retailers. I specify and test a model using more than 3 million daily observations on 385 books, 118 DVDs and 154 CDs, sold by 22 Internet-based retailers that were collected over a 676-day period from March 2003 to February 2005. I obtained a number of interesting findings from the estimation of our logit model. First, quality seems to play a role-I find that both price levels as proxies for store quality, and information on the quality of a product consumers have, affect online price rigidity. Second, greater competition(i.e., less industry concentration) leads to less price rigidity(i.e., more price changes) on the Internet. I also find that Internet-based sellers more frequently change the prices of popular products, and the sellers with broader product coverage change prices less frequently, which seem due to economic forces faced by these Internet-based sellers. To the best of my knowledge, this research is the first to empirically assess price rigidity patterns for multiple industries in Internet-based retailing, and attempt to explain the variation in these patterns. I found that price changes are more likely to be driven by quality, competitive and economic considerations. These results speak to both the IS and economics literatures. To the IS literature these results suggest we take economic considerations into account in more sophisticated ways. The existence and variation in price rigidity argue that simplistic assumptions about frictionless and completely flexible digital prices do not capture the richness of pricing behavior on the Internet. The quality, competitive and economic forces identified in this model suggest promising directions for future theoretical and empirical work on their role in these technologically changing markets. To the economics literature these results offer new evidence on the sources of price rigidity, which can then be incorporated into the development of models of pricing at the firm, industry and even macro-economic level of analysis. It also suggests that there is much to be learned through interdisciplinary research between the IS, economics and related business disciplines.