Trading public parking space

Our paper investigates normative abstractions for the way drivers pursue parking space and respond to pricing policies about public and private parking facilities. The drivers are viewed as strategic agents who make rational decisions while attempting to minimize the cost of the acquired parking spots. We propose auction-based systems for realizing centralized parking allocation schemes, whereby drivers bid for public parking space and a central authority coordinates the parking assignments and payments. These are compared against the conventional uncoordinated parking search practice under fixed parking service cost, formulated as a resource selection game instance. In line with intuition, the auctioning system increases the revenue of the public parking operator exploiting the drivers´ differentiated interest in parking. Less intuitively, the auction-based mechanism does not necessarily induce higher cost for the drivers: by avoiding the uncoordinated search and thus, eliminating the cruising cost, it turns out to be a preferable option for both the operator and the drivers under various combinations of parking demand and pricing policies.