An Utility Approach to the Original Trip Distribution Problem

Abstract

In this chapter and the next we shall discuss simple utility maximization formulations. We shall use basically the same approach as Beckmann and Wallace (1969), adapted to our way of writing the doubly constrained trip distribution problem in Chapter 4. This implies that the social welfare function that we are going to use is simply the sum of the utilities of the individual tripmakers. We shall furthermore make use of the wellknown fact that the complementarity relations of the linear allocation of resources problem has an interpretation as a simple model for the price mechanism on a market with perfect competition (Gale, 1960).