The Robustness of Marginal-Cost Taxes in Affine Congestion Games

Brown, Philip N.; Marden, Jason R.

doi:10.1109/tac.2016.2619674

Cited by 28 publications

(15 citation statements)

References 16 publications

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“…Proof of Proposition 4.1: The first part of the proposition comes from [35]. We thus find the nominally equivalent subsidy mechanism and find the associated price of anarchy bound.…”

Section: Appendixmentioning

confidence: 83%

“…We assign taxes using the optimal scaled marginal cost toll with player heterogeneity, T smc (af + b) := ( √ S L S U ) −1 af . This tolling mechanism was first introduced in [35], and was shown to minimize the price of anarchy in parallel affine congestion games with sensitivity distributions in S bounded by S L and S U . In Proposition 4.1, we give price of anarchy bounds on the optimal scaled marginal cost toll as well as a nominally equivalent subsidy T nes .…”

Section: B Robustness Of Incentives In Affine Congestion Gamesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The Effectiveness of Subsidies and Tolls in Congestion Games

Ferguson,

Brown,

Marden

2021

Preprint

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Are rewards or penalties more effective in influencing user behavior? This work compares the effectiveness of subsidies and tolls in incentivizing user behavior in congestion games. The predominantly studied method of influencing user behavior in network routing problems is to institute taxes which alter users' observed costs in a manner that causes their selfinterested choices to more closely align with a system-level objective. Another conceivable method to accomplish the same goal is to subsidize the users' actions that are preferable from a system-level perspective. We show that, when users behave similarly and predictably, subsidies offer superior performance guarantees to tolls under similar budgetary constraints; however, in the presence of unknown player heterogeneity, subsidies fail to offer the same robustness as tolls.

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“…Proof of Proposition 4.1: The first part of the proposition comes from [35]. We thus find the nominally equivalent subsidy mechanism and find the associated price of anarchy bound.…”

Section: Appendixmentioning

confidence: 83%

Section: B Robustness Of Incentives In Affine Congestion Gamesmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Effectiveness of Subsidies and Tolls in Congestion Games

Ferguson,

Brown,

Marden

2021

Preprint

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“…Recent research has identified several new network-agnostic taxation mechanisms, which are all in some sense generalizations of T mc : in restricted settings, scaled marginal-cost tolls can be non-perverse [21] while guaranteeing improvements; furthermore, there exists a universal taxation mechanism based on T mc which optimizes routing using large tolls [4]. Dynamic network-agnostic tolls converging to T mc are studied in [22].…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Can Taxes Improve Congestion on All Networks?

Brown¹,

Marden²

2019

Preprint

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We ask if it is possible to positively influence social behavior with no risk of unintentionally incentivizing pathological behavior. In network routing problems, if network traffic is composed of many individual agents, it is known that selfinterested behavior among the agents can lead to suboptimal network congestion. We study situations in which a system planner charges monetary tolls for the use of network links in an effort to incentivize efficient routing choices by the users, but in which the users' sensitivity to tolls is heterogeneous and unknown. We seek locally-computed tolls that are guaranteed not to incentivize worse network routing than in the un-influenced case. Our main result is to show that if networks are sufficiently complex and populations sufficiently diverse, perverse incentives cannot be systematically avoided: any taxation mechanism that improves outcomes on one network must necessarily degrade them on another. Nonetheless, for the simple class of parallel networks, non-perverse taxes do exist; we fully characterize all such taxation mechanisms, showing that they are a generalized version of traditional marginal-cost tolls.

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“…As we use financial incentives to influence this behavior, our formulation is related to work in tolling, some of which consider users with different sensitivities to tolls [16], [17]. [18] considers a congestion game framework and derives tolls which drive users to choose socially optimal strategies for a broad class of user strategy update dynamics.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Incentivizing Efficient Equilibria in Traffic Networks with Mixed Autonomy

Bıyık¹,

Lazar²,

Pedarsani³

et al. 2021

Preprint

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Traffic congestion has large economic and social costs. The introduction of autonomous vehicles can potentially reduce this congestion by increasing road capacity via vehicle platooning and by creating an avenue for influencing people's choice of routes. We consider a network of parallel roads with two modes of transportation: (i) human drivers, who will choose the quickest route available to them, and (ii) a ride hailing service, which provides an array of autonomous vehicle route options, each with different prices, to users. We formalize a model of vehicle flow in mixed autonomy and a model of how autonomous service users make choices between routes with different prices and latencies. Developing an algorithm to learn the preferences of the users, we formulate a planning optimization that chooses prices to maximize a social objective. We demonstrate the benefit of the proposed scheme by comparing the results to theoretical benchmarks which we show can be efficiently calculated.

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The Robustness of Marginal-Cost Taxes in Affine Congestion Games

Cited by 28 publications

References 16 publications

The Effectiveness of Subsidies and Tolls in Congestion Games

The Effectiveness of Subsidies and Tolls in Congestion Games

Can Taxes Improve Congestion on All Networks?

Incentivizing Efficient Equilibria in Traffic Networks with Mixed Autonomy

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