IEOR seminars occur on Mondays throughout the fall semester in room 3108 of Etcheverry Hall. Seminars feature leading-edge research from experts in industrial engineering and operations research who come from local, national, and international institutions. Seminars are open to students, faculty, and the public.

Title: Spatiotemporal Pricing for Efficient Autonomous Carpooling Markets

Abstract: We study a market mechanism that sets spatiotemporal toll prices to incentivize riders to take autonomous carpool trips and efficiently share road capacity in a transportation network. In this market, riders form carpool groups, make decisions on departure times and route choices, and make payments to cover the toll prices and trip costs. We develop a new approach to analyze the existence, computation, and implementation of market equilibrium. Here, we build on ideas from the theories of combinatorial auctions and dynamic network flows. Our approach tackles the challenges in market equilibrium characterization arising from: (a) integer and network constraints on the dynamic flow of trips in sharing limited road capacity; (b) incentives of riders with heterogeneous and private preferences to take carpool trips. We provide sufficient conditions on the network topology and riders' preferences that ensure the existence of market equilibrium, and show that equilibrium can be computed in polynomial time. Furthermore, we identify a strategyproof market equilibrium that also achieves maximum utilities for all riders.

Bio: Manxi Wu is an Assistant Professor at Cornell University's School of Operations Research and Information Engineering. Her research focuses on analyzing the strategic behavior of agents and its impact on societal scale systems using game theory, optimization, and machine learning techniques. She also works on designing information and market mechanisms to enhance system efficiency, resiliency, and fairness. Manxi earned her Ph.D. in Social and Engineering Systems from MIT in 2021. Prior to joining Cornell, she was a research fellow at the Simons Program on Learning and Games, and a postdoctoral scholar at EECS, University of California, Berkeley from 2021-2022.Manxi is a recipient of Hammer Fellowship, Siebel Energy Scholarship, and Simons fellowship.