A mechanism design based approach to solving parking slot assignment in the information era

• We propose a mechanism design based approach for parking slot assignment.
• Drivers report private valuation information to the parking manager.
• Both static and dynamic mechanisms are investigated.
• On average drivers are asked to pay 20% of their valuation to ensure truth telling.
• The dynamic mechanism yields better social welfare than the state-of-the-practice.

This paper proposes a mechanism design based approach for public parking slot assignment in an environment empowered by recent advances in parking sensing, infrastructure-to-vehicle, and vehicle-to-infrastructure communications. An important part of the parking slot assignment deals with eliciting truthful private information from drivers while maximizing social welfare. We consider both static and dynamic mechanisms and provide theoretic proofs that, by using coupled slot allocation and payment rules, drivers will be incentivized to participate in the assignment process and truthfully report their private information. The parking manager will benefit by generating non-negative revenue from each assigned driver. Our numerical analysis provides further insights into the implementation of the dynamic mechanisms.