Research team investigates ride-sharing decisions
Between financial incentive and limited convenience
2021-06-01
(Press-News.org) In ride-sharing, trips of two or more customers with similar origins and destinations are combined into a single cab ride. The concept can make a significant contribution to sustainable urban mobility. However, its acceptance depends on human needs and behavior. For example, while shared rides typically offer a financial advantage, passengers might suffer drawbacks in terms of comfort and trip duration. These factors give rise to different adoption behaviors that explain usage patterns observed in 360 million real-world ride requests from New York City and Chicago in 2019. The study has now been published in the journal Nature Communications.
Ride-sharing (or ride-pooling) is most efficient in places with high demand and a large number similar ride requests. Still, it has been difficult to answer if and under what conditions people are actually willing to adopt ride-sharing. In their study, the researchers decipher the complex incentive structure underlying the decision of whether or not to adopt ride-sharing. In a game-theoretic model, they describe the sharing adoption of all users who book rides from the same location.
The researchers demonstrate how interactions between those individuals lead to two qualitatively different patterns of acceptance. In one, willingness to share rides is consistently high. In the other case, however, the willingness to share rides decreases as the overall demand for rides increases. If there are only few users in the system, the number of ride-sharing bookings increases with the number of ride requests, yet if there are many users, the usage levels out. The relative amount of shared ride requests therefore decreases - despite optimized routing with shorter detours for the passengers when demand is high.
"Passengers speculate on being able to take advantage of the cheaper fare when sharing a ride, but they actually hope to be transported alone and thus directly from A to B due to low demand for rides," explains David Storch, a doctoral student at the Chair of Network Dynamics and lead author of the study. When demand is high, for example during typical rush hours, the prospect of being transported as a single passenger is lower - "Passengers almost certainly lose comfort as they share a ride. They tend to book the more expensive fare more often to travel alone."
In an analysis of more than 360 million real trip requests in New York City and Chicago, the researchers were able to identify the demand patterns they had previously found in their model, supporting the validity of their findings. The analysis shows that, depending on the starting point of the trip, both adoption patterns exist in parallel in the two cities. Malte Schröder, research associate at the Chair, interprets the results as follows: "Since both adoption patterns coexist in cities, a moderate increase of the financial incentives is probably already sufficient to strongly increase the acceptance of ride-sharing in other places and for other user groups."
INFORMATION:
Publication:
Title: Incentive-driven transition to high ride-sharing adoption.
Authors: David-Maximilian Storch, Marc Timme, Malte Schröder
Nature Communications
DOI: 10.1038/s41467-021-23287-6
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-23287-6
About the Chair of Network Dynamics
The Chair of Network Dynamics headed by Prof. Marc Timme was created in 2017. The aim of this TU Dresden Strategic Professorship affiliated with both the former Cluster of Excellence "Center for Advancing Electronics Dresden" (cfaed) and the Institute for Theoretical Physics is to connect insights from Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics with applications in Biology and Engineering. It is the first chair of network dynamics of this cross-disciplinary kind in Central Europe. Since networks are almost everywhere around us the research team aims for a unifying understanding of the fundamental mechanisms underlying the collective dynamics of large, nonlinear interconnected systems by combining first principles theory with data-driven analysis and modelling. A substantial part of their work focuses on investigating emergent phenomena and developing conceptually new perspectives on complex systems as well as the theoretical computational tools necessary to understand these systems. This fundamental understanding forms the basis to predict, and eventually control, the dynamics of complex networked systems across disciplines.
http://www.cfaed.tu-dresden.de/cfnd-about
About cfaed
cfaed is a research cluster at TU Dresden (TUD). As an interdisciplinary research center for perspectives of electronics it is located at the TUD as a central scientific unit, but also integrates nine non-university research institutions in Saxony as well as TU Chemnitz as cooperating institutes. With its vision, the cluster aims to shape the future of electronics and initiate revolutionary new applications, such as electronics that do not require boot time, are capable of THz imaging, or support complex biosensor technology. These innovations make conceivable performance improvements and applications that would not be possible with the continuation of today's silicon chip-based technology. In order to achieve its goals, cfaed combines the thirst for knowledge of the natural sciences with the innovative power of engineering.
http://www.cfaed.tu-dresden.de
[Attachments] See images for this press release:
ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:
2021-06-01
Besides common symptoms such as fever, cough and respiratory distress, some children have an atypical form of COVID-19 known as multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children (MIS-C), characterized by persistent fever and inflammation of several organs, such as the heart and intestines, as well as the lungs to a lesser extent. Reports of MIS-C have been increasingly associated with severe cases and deaths in several countries including Brazil since the onset of the pandemic.
Researchers affiliated with the University of São Paulo's Medical School (FM-USP) and Adolfo Lutz Institute in Brazil performed the largest ...
2021-06-01
In a new study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a research team of the Institute of Complex Systems of the University of Barcelona (UBICS) analysed the time evolution of real complex networks and developed a model in which the emergence of new nodes can be related to pre-existing nodes, similarly to the evolution of species in biology.
This new study analyses the time evolution of the citation network in scientific journals and the international trade network over a 100-year period. According to M. Ángeles Serrano, ICREA researcher at UBICS, "what we observe in these real networks is that both grow in a self-similar way, that is, their connectivity properties ...
2021-06-01
BUFFALO, N.Y. -- For many people, the need to go grocery shopping is met with a sigh, or an "ugh." It's generally not considered to be an enjoyable experience.
For moms who shop using WIC benefits, it can be a downright awful experience, one that's often made worse by difficulty finding eligible products and dealing with a lengthy checkout process. Add kids in tow and it's enough for many moms to forego re-enrolling in the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children, commonly known as WIC.
But researchers at the University at Buffalo are working on ways to improve ...
2021-06-01
ANN ARBOR, Mich. - Fibroid symptoms, such as heavy menstrual bleeding and abdominal pain, are increasingly driving women to the emergency room.
In fact, tens of thousands of women were seen annually in the emergency department for the condition, which involves benign growths in the uterus, over a 12-year period.
But only 1 in 10 of these visits led to a hospital admission, suggesting that many cases may have been managed in an alternative, non-urgent health setting, according to recent Michigan Medicine research.
"Fibroids are often a chronic disease, so we have opportunities to treat this through established care with a trusted health provider. Yet, we've seen a big increase in women using the emergency room ...
2021-06-01
While the term "supergene" may bring to mind the genetic hocus-pocus of Peter Parker's transformation into Spiderman, supergenes are actually fairly common phenomena in the realm of biology. A supergene refers to a genomic region containing multiple genes or genetic elements that are tightly linked, allowing genetic variants across the region to be co-inherited. Supergenes may arise when there is a clear benefit to inheriting specific combinations of biological traits together. Perhaps the most well-known examples of supergenes are sex chromosomes, which allow traits that are beneficial to the reproductive success of one sex to be co-inherited. In humans, this ...
2021-06-01
(Boston)--Only a small subset of people who get a lung infection go on to become very sick yet who will become severely ill or why is unclear. This is now widely recognized in the context of COVID-19, where most people have mild or no illness while others with the same infection become extremely sick or even die.
Researchers now have discovered that after recovering from a respiratory infection, new cells get deposited in lung tissue, persist there and then become antibody secreting cells very quickly if the lungs later get re-infected by something similar.
"It is increasingly clear that our lungs contain their own specialized immune system, different from the immune system throughout the rest of the body," explained corresponding ...
2021-06-01
In some environments there is no way for a seed to know for sure when the best time to germinate is.
In spring, cues like light, temperature and water may suggest to seeds that conditions are optimal for germination, but a week later an unpredictable drought or frost could kill the emerging seedlings.
So how does a plant make sure that all of its offspring are not killed at once by an ill-timed environmental stress following germination?
There is evidence that some plant species produce seeds that germinate at different times to hedge their bets against this risk. Many species produce seeds that can enter a dormant state and exist in the soil for several years and some also produce seeds that germinate at different ...
2021-06-01
Research by scientists from University of Southampton (UK) and the Central University of Jharkhand (India) and has shown the first COVID-19 lockdown in India led to an improvement in air quality and a reduction in land surface temperature in major urban areas across the country.
The study found that travel and work restrictions imposed early in the pandemic resulted in a significant environmental improvement, due to an abrupt reduction in industrial activities and a major decrease in the use of land and air transport.
The international team used data from a range of Earth Observation sensors, including those from the European Space Agency's Sentinel-5p and NASA's MODIS sensors, to measure changes in surface temperature and atmospheric ...
2021-06-01
Efforts to contain the novel coronavirus have caused lockdowns and school closures around the world. These efforts and policies have unfortunately cut off many children from valuable resources such as the opportunity for exercise, access to clean water and food, learning, and socialization. Therefore, the effects on mental health and behavior may be found not just in adults but children. However, studies published thus far have been limited to elucidating the mood of middle school and high school students and the conditions for which mood problems occur ...
2021-06-01
Drinking straws are single use plastic products which will be subjected to a Europe-wide sales ban from 2021 onwards. This is stated in EU Directive 2019/904 from 5 June 2019. Consequently, alternative materials have to be established for the production of drinking straws as well as other frequently used products which predominantly were made of plastic so far.
As set out in the EU Framework Regulation for food contact material (Regulation (EC) No. 1935/2004), objects that come into direct contact with food must be safe. The German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment (BfR) has appraised straw, silicone, metal, paper and paper-board, durum wheat, and glass for their suitability to replace plastic ...
LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:
[Press-News.org] Research team investigates ride-sharing decisions
Between financial incentive and limited convenience
