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Routing Games in the Wild: Efficiency, Equilibration, Regret, and a Price of Anarchy Bound via Long Division

Published: 08 April 2022 Publication History

Abstract

Routing games are amongst the most well studied domains of game theory. How relevant are these pen-and-paper calculations to understanding the reality of everyday traffic routing? We focus on a semantically rich dataset that captures detailed information about the daily behavior of thousands of Singaporean commuters and examine the following basic questions:
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Does the traffic stabilize?
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Is the system behavior consistent with latency-minimizing agents?
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Is the resulting system efficient?
In order to capture the efficiency of the traffic network in a way that agrees with our everyday intuition we introduce a new metric, the Free-flow Index (FFI), which reflects the inefficiency resulting from system congestion. Along the way, we provide the first model-free computation of an upper bound to the price of anarchy utilizing only real world measurements of traffic data.

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Published In

cover image ACM Transactions on Economics and Computation
ACM Transactions on Economics and Computation  Volume 10, Issue 1
March 2022
149 pages
ISSN:2167-8375
EISSN:2167-8383
DOI:10.1145/3505215
Issue’s Table of Contents

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 08 April 2022
Accepted: 01 October 2021
Revised: 01 May 2021
Received: 01 July 2019
Published in TEAC Volume 10, Issue 1

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Author Tags

  1. Congestion games
  2. behavioral game theory
  3. crowdsensing

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  • Research-article
  • Refereed

Funding Sources

  • Ministry of Education, Singapore
  • MOE AcRF Tier 2
  • NRF
  • Singapore National Research Foundation (NRF)

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  • (2024) Counter-Intuitive Effects of Q -Learning Exploration in a Congestion Dilemma IEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2024.335860812(15984-15996)Online publication date: 2024
  • (2023)On the Intrinsic Fragility of the Price of AnarchyIEEE Control Systems Letters10.1109/LCSYS.2023.33353157(3573-3578)Online publication date: 2023
  • (2023)Understanding short-distance travel to school in Singapore: A data-driven approachTravel Behaviour and Society10.1016/j.tbs.2023.01.00731(349-362)Online publication date: Apr-2023

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