An Incentive Mechanism for Private Parking-Sharing Programs in an Imperfect Information Setting.

This article focuses on designing a truth-telling matching-and-pricing mechanism for parking-sharing programs where private parking slot owners share spaces with drivers. It proposes a centralized assignment procedure that matches drivers to feasible parking slots based on spatial-temporal compatibility of reported travel plans and uses the Vickrey-Clark-Groves (VCG) pricing mechanism to incentivize drivers to truthfully report their private departure times. The mechanism guarantees four key properties: incentive compatibility (IC), individual rationality (IR), allocative efficiency (AE), and budget balance (BB), even under imperfect information where drivers are uncertain about competitors' participation. Extensions to dynamic settings show that sequential reporting and rolling-horizon implementations maintain truthfulness and system efficiency, supported by numerical experiments using real-world data from Beijing that demonstrate superior performance compared to time-based pricing methods in both static and dynamic scenarios.