Addressing Social Inequality and Improper Water Distribution in Cities: A Case Study of Karachi, Pakistan

Inhabited by almost 20 million people, Karachi, also known as the “city of lights”, houses almost 60 percent of the industries in Pakistan and is considered as the financial and industrial center of the country. The city contributes almost 12–15 percent to the gross domestic product (GDP), showing its significance in Pakistan’s economy. Unfortunately, with the increase in population, the city is facing a serious shortage of water supply. The current allocation of water among the city's districts is not equitable, which has caused water scarcity and even riots in some areas. Surface water and ground water are the two primary sources of water supply in the city. The water supply provided by Karachi Water and Sewerage Board (KWSB) is approximately 650 million gallons per day (MGD) against a demand of 480–866 million gallons per day (MGD), resulting in a serious shortfall. Keeping a holistic view in mind, this paper focuses specifically on proposing measures to address the gap in proposing concrete solutions to manage Karachi’s increasing water woes. It also proposes a water allocation mechanism and uses Nash bargaining theory to address the inefficient and unequal water distribution. Results indicate that our suggested policies and water allocation mechanism have the potential to simultaneously resolve the supply–demand mismatch and water shortage problems of the city.

An Improved Approach for Constructing the Real Estate Price Index with Bargaining Effect

Bargaining game is ubiquitous in real estate markets due to its heterogeneity. Price index, the most important measurement the market condition, constructed with current approaches however cannot consider the effect of bargaining. Therefore, in this work, we provide a construction of price index including sellers’ bargaining power based on Nash bargaining theory and Heckman’s two-step regression. The sellers’ bargaining power is estimated from the aggregate data of list-price, sale-price and time-on-the-market. Using this method, the residential price index of an empirical example was conducted. The results are in reasonable agreement with the realistic situations, verifying the feasibility and applicability of the developed method.

Pricing of Vehicle-to-Grid Services in a Microgrid by Nash Bargaining Theory

Owners of electric vehicles (EVs) can offer the storage capacity of their batteries to the operator of a microgrid as a service called vehicle-to-grid (V2G) to hold the balance between supply and demand of electricity, particularly when the microgrid has intermittent renewable energy sources. Literature review implies that V2G has economic benefits for both microgrid operator and EV owners, but it is unclear how these benefits are divided between them. The challenge grows when the policy makers rely on the V2G revenue as an incentive for expanding the penetration of EVs in the automotive market. This paper models the interaction between microgrid operator and EV owners as a bargaining game to determine how the benefits of V2G should be divided. The method has been implemented on a hybrid power system with high wind penetration in addition to diesel generators in Manjil, Iran. The results indicate that, in addition to V2G benefits, government subsidies are necessary to promote the use of EVs.

Bargaining Based Supply Chain Scheduling

Coordination across the supply chain improves the manufacturing efficiency a lot. To provide a rational cooperation mechanism for supply chain scheduling, a bargaining model was established on the basis of the Nash bargaining theory. The solution of the model draws forth a new scheduling problem with multi-objective product. A polynomial heuristic was designed to find the near-optimal bargaining solution under the assembly circumstance.