On the role of signaling in mitigation of road-traffic congestion: The price of anarchy of signaling-based strategies in stochastic networks
type: CreativeWork
description: We study the influence of information design on routing in the presence of vagaries, following the canonical congestion game approach. We allow a central controller to observe nature's state and make exploit the information gap between her and the drivers, to cater information to drivers in a most social manner. In addition to the extreme cases of full and no information, she can also use randomized public signaling and personal recommendations. We revisit these programs and raise algorithmic concerns, but most importantly, we revisit Roughgarden's celebrated Price of Anarchy (PoA) in uncertain networks. Unexpectedly, no upper bound on the PoA holds if drivers are kept uninformed in the presence of vagaries, while fully informed drivers perform regularly. On the other hand, uninformed drivers might outperform informed drivers by a factor equal to the price of anarchy. Comparing pairwise all information provisions, we establish a table of competitive ratios, which turn out to only take vales one, the PoA, and infinity.
abstract: We study the influence of information design on routing in the presence of vagaries, following the canonical congestion game approach. We allow a central controller to observe nature's state and make exploit the information gap between her and the drivers, to cater information to drivers in a most social manner. In addition to the extreme cases of full and no information, she can also use randomized public signaling and personal recommendations. We revisit these programs and raise algorithmic concerns, but most importantly, we revisit Roughgarden's celebrated Price of Anarchy (PoA) in uncertain networks. Unexpectedly, no upper bound on the PoA holds if drivers are kept uninformed in the presence of vagaries, while fully informed drivers perform regularly. On the other hand, uninformed drivers might outperform informed drivers by a factor equal to the price of anarchy. Comparing pairwise all information provisions, we establish a table of competitive ratios, which turn out to only take vales one, the PoA, and infinity.
author: Massicot, Olivier
language: en
keywords: Road-traffic, congestion, signaling games, signal, information design, game theory, price of anarchy, Wardrop equilibrium, Bayesian game
date published: 2020-03-02T21:57:51Z
date modified: 2026-07-22T22:24:45Z
provider: University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

PropertyValue
property ID: Handle
value: http://hdl.handle.net/2142/106130