In a joint commentary, SMU Associate Professor of Information Systems Pradeep Varakantham and SMU PhD student Supriyo Ghosh shared their views on how to use Big Data to make the bike-sharing systems more efficient. They discussed the major concerns these systems typically face and ways to address the inefficiencies. They propose a practice, in which “we place the onus on users, instead of intermediaries, to position bikes in the right locations.”  An incentive-based system, in which customers are offered a reward to leave the bikes at the desired locations — meaning locations where there is likely to be greater demand for bikes — could work, they noted. 

They stressed that the key challenge in providing monetary incentives is balancing the trade-off between being attractive to customers (so they leave the bike at a location desired by the bike-sharing company) and being feasible (without making a loss) for the bike-sharing company. They have developed computational techniques that balance this trade-off by utilising bike-usage patterns observed from the data.