Pricing in emerging mobility services: a comprehensive review

Over the last decade, numerous technologies and innovations enabled the emergence of new mobility services. These emerging mobility services include, but are not limited to, carsharing systems, ridesharing systems, and future Shared Autonomous Vehicles (SAV). These services are highly personalized, resulting in increased operational requirement for every demand increase. As such, pricing is an effective tool for demand management and may also improve revenue and profits, reduce costs, mitigate congestion, reduce air pollution, balance systems better (e.g., vehicle relocation and personnel assignments), and even improve rider experience and reduce user’s waiting time. There has been an increasing number of research activities and publications on pricing of emerging mobility systems. This paper is a comprehensive literature review of recent papers concerning pricing of emerging mobility services. Pricing problems are built upon systems’ operations and objectives, and therefore depending on the system, its approach will be different. In this review, we focus on three emerging systems: ridesharing, carsharing, and SAV. With this understanding, we provide an overview of pricing typology, demand structure, objectives, operational considerations, modeling types and details, and solution methodologies.