PittSmartLiving (PSL) is a $1.4M 3-year National Science Foundation project (NSF #1739413) hosted at the University of Pittsburgh to reduce public transit congestion. The PSL Human Behavior Lab uses applied economics theory and experiments to model the behavior of riders and businesses and design a market to connect the two.
We identified instances of potential excess demand and showed through simulated data that this filtering can remove the bias introduced by the censored data observed/logged by the system that results in underestimating the degree of excess demand.
During the 2020 supply shortages caused by Covid-19, we created a crowdsourcing data platform to aggregate information about shortages and congestion across supermarkets in Pittsburgh.
We shed light on how the value of a queue evolves as people wait in line. We also disentangle the extent to which this evolution can be attributed to changes in prospective versus experienced wait under different queue characteristics.