Study On Ticket Pricing Of China's High-speed Railway Based On Dynamic Game

The issue of ticket pricing of High-speed railway(HSR)is tied to the sustainable development of HSR operation,transportation market and comprehensive transportation system.Now,ticket pricing is become one of the critical issues of China's HSR.Profitability of the HSR operations and passenger's travel choices are key factors in ticket pricing.Multi-mode transport competition will also affect the ticket pricing of HSR.In addition,the characters of service and welfare of China's HSR has an effect on ticket pricing.The character of HSR service is the speed,which is advanced compare to other land transportation.The character of welfare of China's HSR is that the operator needs to balance profit and passenger welfare,which is a major difference with other countries.The current ticket pricing of China's HSR is based on cost and profit,which is still a static pricing model and doesn't include travel behavior of passengers and market competition.Most of the existing studies on the ticket pricing of HSR are based on a single view.It lacks the integration of multiple views and does not include the characters of service and public welfare.This dissertation discusses the problem of ticket pricing of China's HSR.It analyzes influencing factors and the dynamic game in the pricing process by considering the balance of supply and demand,market competition,characters of service and welfare of China's HSR.Based on dynamic game,it builds China's HSR ticket pricing model.It is an extension and development of the pricing theory in transport,which provide thoughts of ticket pricing for HSR operator.The main work and conclusion are summaried as follows:(1)It reviews the studies of HSR ticket pricing from four aspects: the operator's cost and profit of the supply side,the travel behavior of the demand side,multi-mode transport competition and the characters of China's HSR.The pricing theories focus on static analysis and lack of dynamic analysis.The existing literature lacks of integration of multiple views.The models pay less attention to the factors of time and spatial of transport service,and character of welfare to China's HSR.(2)It analyzes the influencing factors of HSR ticket pricing based on traditional price theory,characters of HSR service and discrete choice theory of passenger travel behavior.It analyzes the functions and influencing factors of supply and demand,indicating the relevant variables.It points out that the factors of time and spatial of HSR services are the sources of pricing.The balance between supply and demand is the basis of pricing.Market factors and government factors are the external forces in the pricing process.(3)Based on the Game theory and Welfare economics,it analyzes the dynamic game in the ticket pricing process by considering the realistic characters of China's HSR.It analyzes the players,game process and the return of the dynamic game.And explaines that how final solution deviate from the theoretical optimum caused by uncertain factors.It concludes that the ticket pricing of HSR is a dynamic game problem: with the initial prices decided by the operators,the passengers choose the most favorable travel mode,and each mode of transport adjusts the prices to attract passengers.The following rounds of optimization will eventually lead to stable outcomes.Among the multiple Nash equilibrium solutions,the player needs to choose the optimal choice and decision is affected by many factors,such as: pricing objectives,principles of optimality and uncertainties.(4)It builds a ticket pricing model for China's HSR according to the above influential factors and the dynamic game.It analyzes the problem of ticket pricing of HSR when the operator facing single objectives,such as profit maximization or passenger welfare maximization.Computational experiments showes the Nash equilibrium solutions and the effects of quantity of supply and demand,the effect of time and spatial to the equilibrium.The capacity should be demand-oriented to achieve profitablity.Decreasing travel time and improving comfort helps to increase the profit of HSR operator.If speed-up technology can be achieved by low cost,the ticket price and the number of passengers will increase,thus increase the profits.If the technology comes with high cost,much higher prices increase,the number of passengers and profits will decrease.Thus it suitable for peak period with less flexible demand.(5)Based on the Nash equilibrium solutions,it analyzes the pricing optimization process.It considers two scenarios: for the HSR operator,it faces the objectives of profit and passenger welfare;for the heterogeneous passengers,they make choices among multiple transports in short-haul and long-haul.The result shows that: multi-objective pricing solutions are Pareto improvement for single-objective solutions.Short-haul tickets,and tickets for time-sensitive passengers have a higher price increase.The pricing decisions are affected by market competition.There are some policy implications: multi-objective pricing method meets the current ticket reform requirements and beneficial to the stability of the market;the chosen objective should consider the market environment,factors of time and spatial.It encourages to change the preferred objectives and expected values according to specific periods and lines;the acceptance of participants should be considered in pricing decisions.Compared with existing studies,the innovations are summarized as following:(1)It integrated multiple views including the view of corporate,travel behavior and competitive behavior.It analyzed the influencing factors and dynamic game from the static and dynamic perspectives.(2)It considered the characters of service and welfare of China's HSR.The biggest difference between the product of HSR passenger service and other products is that it provides spatial movement with time.Including the factors of time and spatial is consistent with the characters of passenger service.The HSR operator makes optimal decisions under the objectives of corporate profits and passenger welfare,which is consistent with the character of welfare of China's HSR.(3)The modelling considered the multi-mode transport competition in a network which is close to the reality,thus enriched the existing studies on network pricing and competitive pricing.Facing the competition of high-way bus and airline in a linear network,HSR operator make optimal decisions.It is consistent with reality and explain the pricing issue appropriately.(4)It's the first time to apply the epsilon-constraint method to solve the multi-objective optimization problem in ticket pricing of HSR.It decomposed the problem of multiple objectives and introduced the epsilon-constraint method to improve the upper-level in bi-level model.The trade-offs between multiple objectives are clear.It overcame the problem of previous work that weighted-sum method can not solve non-convex.