Regulating Autonomous Mobility-on-Demand Operators with Fixed and Adaptive Penalties: A Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning Approach

arXiv:2611.07122v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Profit-maximizing Autonomous Mobility-on-Demand (AMoD) operators may exploit consumer surplus through excessive prices and underserve less profitable regions by relocating vehicles away from them. We study how penalty-based regulation of an AMoD operator in a multimodal mobility system can limit surge pricing and improve regional service availability. We model regulation as an outer control loop that acts on a learning-based operator. Static regulation with fixed penalties is formulated as a Markov Decision Process for an operator that jointly controls pricing and rebalancing, and dynamic regulation as a Partially Observable Stochastic Game in which a regulator periodically adjusts region-specific penalties in closed loop.