The price of choice: models, paradoxes, and inference for ‘mobility as a service’

A city’s transportation network is made up of subsystems, often under separate management, linked together through the choices made by users. This paper introduces a transport model which combines a discrete choice model of users, with a resource allocation model of a subsystems. This combined model gives a direct economic interpretation of tradeoffs in the system. For example, it tells us how much of a rideshare price is attributable to the cost of running the platform and how much is profit-making. The model can also be used to predict knock-on effects in the style of Braess’s paradox, where an improvement in one part of the network might induce problems in other parts because of selfish choices made by users and by subsystems.