Effectiveness and acceptability of congestion pricing
Date
2015
Authors
Janusch, Nicholas Roger, author
Kroll, Stephan, advisor
Goemans, Christopher, committee member
Loomis, John, committee member
Mushinski, David, committee member
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Abstract
Urban congestion is a pervasive and growing problem in developed and developing countries. The lack of excludability for scarce urban space, specifically roads and parking spaces, creates a common resource problem yielding a congestion externality that generates many external costs. Marginal social cost pricing has long been advocated as a means of alleviating market failures resulting from such negative (environmental) externalities. Congestion pricing comes in numerous forms (e.g., tolls on roads or express lanes), but has only been sporadically adopted despite congestion being a growing problem. The literature argues that concerns on equity and fairness issues and revenue redistribution are major hurdles of making an effective congestion pricing policy politically feasible and publicly acceptable. This dissertation investigates the effectiveness and acceptability of congestion pricing schemes in different contexts and examines whether individual beliefs in addition to the objective welfare effects determine voter acceptability. The first chapter employs laboratory experiments to examine the evolution of voting behavior after individuals become accustomed to the congestion problem and the congestion pricing policy, and the nature of the experience from the congestion policy. The congestion pricing policy exogenously creates inequitable outcomes which in some cases makes some people worse off. The second chapter develops and examines a three-player bottleneck congestion game and examines the ex-ante and ex-post welfare implications of an \textit{ex-ante} efficient tolling policy. The third chapter examines the effectiveness and acceptability of tolls in the three-player bottleneck congestion game using laboratory experiments where equity concerns are endogenously determined. The results suggest policymakers should be open to and considerate of the equity effects, the characteristics and beliefs of their constituents, and how to earmark revenues before implementing efficiency enhancing environmental policies.
Description
Rights Access
Subject
congestion
incentive-based mechanisms
pricing
externality
acceptability
lab experiment