The Power of Signaling and Its Intrinsic Connection to the Price of Anarchy

Nachbar, Jamie; Xu, Haifeng

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-94662-3_1

Cited by 2 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 30 publications

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“…The potential of information design for non-atomic congestion games was illustrated through examples by Das, Kamenica, and Mirka (2017). Nachbar and Xu (2021) further explored different signaling regimes and study connections with the price of anarchy. Massicot and Langbort (2019) fully characterized the optimal policy for networks consisting of two edges with affine cost where the cost of one edge does not depend on the state.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Information Design for Congestion Games with Unknown Demand

Griesbach,

Hoefer,

Klimm

et al. 2024

AAAI

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We study a novel approach to information design in the standard traffic model of network congestion games. It captures the natural condition that the demand is unknown to the users of the network. A principal (e.g., a mobility service) commits to a signaling strategy, observes the realized demand and sends a (public) signal to agents (i.e., users of the network). Based on the induced belief about the demand, the users then form an equilibrium. We consider the algorithmic goal of the principal: Compute a signaling scheme that minimizes the expected total cost of the induced equilibrium. We concentrate on single-commodity networks and affine cost functions, for which we obtain the following results. First, we devise a fully polynomial-time approximation scheme (FPTAS) for the case that the demand can only take two values. It relies on several structural properties of the cost of the induced equilibrium as a function of the updated belief about the distribution of demands. We show that this function is piecewise linear for any number of demands, and monotonic for two demands. Second, we give a complete characterization of the graph structures for which it is optimal to fully reveal the information about the realized demand. This signaling scheme turns out to be optimal for all cost functions and probability distributions over demands if and only if the graph is series-parallel. Third, we propose an algorithm that computes the optimal signaling scheme for any number of demands whose time complexity is polynomial in the number of supports that occur in a Wardrop equilibrium for some demand. Finally, we conduct a computational study that tests this algorithm on real-world instances.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Information Design for Congestion Games with Unknown Demand

Griesbach,

Hoefer,

Klimm

et al. 2024

AAAI

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…The potential of information design for non-atomic congestion games was illustrated through examples by Das et al [21]. Nachbar and Xu [49] further explored different signaling regimes and study connections with the price of anarchy. Massicot and Langbort [45] fully characterized the optimal policy for networks consisting of two edges with affine cost where the cost of one edge does not depend on the state.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%