Prohibiting cherry-picking: Regulating vehicle sharing services who determine fleet and service structure

Vehicle sharing services make travel more convenient, but increase traffic, pollute the environment, and negatively impact existing markets. To achieve a high societal welfare, public authorities regulate vehicle sharing. However, it remains unclear whether these regulations work efficiently without unexpected influences on seemingly unrelated aspects of fleet service structure. We study decisions operators, measure efficiency effectiveness regulations. By investigating interactions we gain insights how operators should adjust their regulators Operators adapt size, open stations, availability, rebalancing operations to given formalize decision optimal structure as Mixed Integer Second-Order Cone Program. Using examples, show that inter-dependencies between different welfare indicators are non-trivial, possibly even counter-intuitive, suggesting numerical approach determine direction relevance influencing factors. We, thus, conduct large artificial instances case using data from New York City. Regulating number or total distance reduces empty similar extent (by than 30% vehicles in NYC study), substantially regulating directly. Among all studied regulations, enforcing equal availability results least profit loss (10% study). Unlike other imposing tax predominantly affects linearly, can thus be enforced controlled easily.