• Journal of Korean Society of Transportation
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• v.25 no.6
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• pp.209-230
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• 2007

This paper analyzed the social cost function of a congestion-prone service system, which is developed from the social cost minimization problem. The analysis focused on the following two issues that have not been explicitly explored in the previous studies: the effect of the heterogeneity of value-of-travel-times among customers on the structure of cost functions; and the structure of the supplier cost function constituting the social cost function. The analysis gave a number of findings that could be summarized as follows. First, the social marginal cost for one unit increase in system output having a certain value-of-travel-time is the sum of the service time cost for that value-of-travel-time and the marginal congestion cost for the average value-of-service-time of all the system outputs. Second, the marginal congestion cost equals the marginal supplier cost of system output under the condition that supplier compensates the customers for the changed service time costs which is incurred by the marginal capacity increase necessary for economically facilitating an additional system output. Third, the compensated marginal cost is the multiple of the marginal capacity cost and the inverse of system utilization ratio, if the service time function is homogeneous of degree zero in its inputs.