Preliminary Results of Experimental Economics Application to Urban Goods Modeling Research

The setting and the preliminary results are described in regard to an experimental economics application to urban goods modeling research. With a simplified representation of the New York City metropolitan area, a simulation system at the heart of the economic experiment was used to capture the behavior of a set of volunteers playing the role of trucking companies trying to maximize profits in a context of market competition. The resulting data sets represent an approximation of the spatial price equilibrium solutions that provide a wealth of information about the joint behavior of shippers, receivers, and trucking companies in urban areas. These data sets were used to gain insights into the effect of network and market structure on a set of performance measures created for each of the trucking companies in the data. Overall, in the context of spatial price equilibrium behavior, the trucking companies' performance measures depend on factors such as the number of centroids in the overall market, number of competitors for transportation of cargoes, amount of freight to be transported, and level of market transparency.