Mechanism Design with Predicted Task Revenue for Bike Sharing Systems

Bike sharing systems have been widely deployed around the world in recent years. A core problem in such systems is to reposition the bikes so that the distribution of bike supply is reshaped to better match the dynamic bike demand. When the bike-sharing company or platform is able to predict the revenue of each reposition task based on historic data, an additional constraint is to cap the payment for each task below its predicted revenue. In this paper, we propose an incentive mechanism called FEITE to incentivize users to park bicycles at locations desired by the platform toward rebalancing supply and demand. FEITE possesses four important economic and computational properties such as truthfulness and budget feasibility. Furthermore, we prove that when the payment budget is tight, the overall revenue will still exceed or equal the budget. Otherwise, FEITE achieves 2-approximation as compared to the optimal (revenue-maximizing) solution, which is close to the lower bound of at least $\sqrt{2}$ that we also prove. Using an industrial dataset obtained from a large bike-sharing company, our experiments show that FEITE is effective in rebalancing bike supply and demand and generating high revenue as a result, which outperforms several benchmark mechanisms.