Eren Inci won the Kuhmo-Nectar Award

FASS faculty member Eren Inci won the Best Paper Award at the Kuhmo-Nectar Conference on Transport Economics for his joint work with Kevin Hasker (Bilkent University) entitled “Free Parking for All in Shopping Malls”.  Kuhmo-Nectar Conference is one of the most prestigious conferences on transport economics in the world. The past recipients of the award include prominent transport economists Richard Arnott (University of California, Riverside), Robin Lindsey (University of British Columbia), and Mogens Fosgerau (Technical University of Denmark).

This paper is the first to analyze the economics of shopping mall parking. As opposed to the common view, it explains why providing parking for free and embedding the costs of parking into the price of goods sold at the mall may be socially desirable. The paper also analyzes minimum parking requirements, which specify the least amount of parking that every land use must provide. Even though these requirements exist all over the world, they have been criticized by some popular press and urban planning circles as being irrational and unreasonable. By providing the micro-economic foundations of minimum parking requirements for the first time, the paper adds another angle to the discussions.

We congratulate Eren Inci for his success in his research.

FASS