You Get What You Share: Incentives for a Sharing Economy

Abstract

In recent years, a range of online applications have facilitated resource sharing among users, resulting in a significant increase in resource utilization. In all such applications, sharing one’s resources or skills with other agents increases social welfare. In general, each agent will look for other agents whose available resources complement hers, thereby forming natural sharing groups. In this paper, we study settings where a large population self-organizes into sharing groups. In many cases, centralized optimization approaches for creating an optimal partition of the user population are infeasible because either the central authority does not have the necessary information to compute an optimal partition, or it does not have the power to enforce a partition. Instead, the central authority puts in place an incentive structure in the form of a utility sharing method, before letting the participants form the sharing groups by themselves. We first analyze a simple equal-sharing method, which is the one most typically encountered in practice and show that it can lead to highly inefficient equilibria. We then propose a Shapley-sharing method and show that it significantly improves overall social welfare.

Project games

“…project games fall within the class of monotone valid utility games introduced in [36] and further considered in [4,6,20,21,24,28,29]. In a monotone valid utility game, there is a ground set of objects V , and a strategy for a player consists in selecting some subset of universal weights [Prop.…”

When Effort May Fail: Equilibria of Shared Effort with a Threshold

“…This model employs the pairwise stability approach Jackson and Wolinsky (1996), which in addition to guarding against unilateral deviations, guards against 2 agents deviating to a common project too. Gollapudi et al Gollapudi et al (2017) allow an agent merely to choose which single team to join. They consider several profit sharing models, including equal sharing, but without any threshold.…”

Towards Systematic Specification of Non-Functional Requirements for Sharing Economy Systems

“…As far as efficiency, in most SE applications there are natural limits on the extent to which the resources can be shared [24]. In ride-hailing, each vehicle has a fixed capacity for passengers, accommodations have a fixed size, and so on.…”

“…Therefore, game-theoretical investigations into a revenue-distribution mechanism inducing a near-optimal, self-organizing group allocation are needed. Early theoretical work [24] in this area proves that welfare distribution based on the Shapley value [25] shows promise; however, embedding such theoretical results into an actual SE application is far from trivial.…”