Parking Assisting Applications: Effectiveness and Side-Issues in Managing Public Goods

With the emergence of mobile communication devices and social networking applications, new opportunities arise for various mobile networking applications. In this paper, we seek to experimentally study some fundamental properties of vehicular social applications that have been deployed to assist in the parking search process. The awareness and incentive mechanisms that are commonly incorporated in different instances of social parking applications are modeled and simulation scenarios are considered to explore particular aspects of these applications. It is shown that application users experience improved performance due to the increased efficiency they generate in the parking search process, without (substantially) degrading the performance of non-users. This is extremely important since applications managing common (public) goods should not provide benefits to their users by penalizing or almost excluding non-users. The incentive mechanisms are effective in the sense that they do provide preferential treatment to those fully cooperating but they induce rich-club phenomena and difficulties to newcomers. Interestingly, those problems, that may be a concern for all applications managing common (public) goods, seem to be alleviated by free-riding phenomena and dynamic behaviors.