PRIN Project – Autonomous vehicles and new technologies in transport: market design and legal issues

Giuseppe Bellantuono is leading a research unit at the University of Trento within an interdisciplinary collaboration with economists from the Universities of Bolzano/Bozen and Rome-Tor Vergata. The project was funded by the Italian Ministry for Research in 2019 and will last for three years. The abstract of the project is available below.

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Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) will deeply affect the transportation sector in the near future. They will remarkably change demand for mobility, by reducing the opportunity cost of car commute and by automatizing services that are currently requiring human intervention.
Our project analyzes two crucial aspects of the future AVs market. We study the effects of different market design choices. The presence of AVs, associated with the availability of increasingly real-time information of traffic flows, raises the potential benefits from traffic centralization. Using a theory approach, we investigate the structure of efficient tax and sets of rules, criteria and prioritization systems for road capacity allocation when travelers have heterogeneous needs and constraints. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to apply the notion of market design in the AVs sector. Also, we provide a
complementary legal analysis of market design under AVs, using an interdisciplinary and comparative law approach. We will study how coordination among regulators in charge of different sector-specific legal regimes, as well as horizontal legal regimes (competition law, data protection law and cybersecurity law) can lead to the selection of welfare optimal business models and market design.