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Routing Games in the Wild: Efficiency, Equilibration and Regret

Large-Scale Field Experiments in Singapore

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Web and Internet Economics (WINE 2017)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 10660))

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Abstract

Routing games are amongst the most well studied domains of game theory. How relevant are these theoretical models and results to capturing the reality of everyday traffic? 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:

  • Does the traffic equilibrate?

  • Is the system behavior consistent with latency minimizing agents?

  • Is the resulting system efficient?

The answers to all three questions are shown to be largely positive. Finally, 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 stress of catastrophe, which reflects the combined inefficiencies of both tragedy of the commons as well as price of anarchy effects.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Indeed, if we keep increasing the total flow in e.g. Pigou’s example, eventually both in the optimal and equilibrium flows almost all flow will be routed through the slow link.

  2. 2.

    Statistics were compiled from data.gov.sg.

  3. 3.

    Household Interview Travel Survey 2012: Public Transport Mode Share Rises To 63%, LTA News Release.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the National Science Experiment team at SUTD for their help: Garvit Bansal, Sarah Nadiawati, Hugh Tay Keng Liang, Nils Ole Tippenhauer, Bige Tunçer, Darshan Virupashka, Erik Wilhelm and Yuren Zhou. The National Science Experiment is supported by the Singapore National Research Foundation (NRF), Grant RGNRF1402.

Barnabé Monnot acknowledges the SUTD Presidential Graduate Fellowship. Francisco Benita acknowledges CONACyT CVU 369933 (Mexico). Georgios Piliouras acknowledges SUTD grant SRG ESD 2015 097, MOE AcRF Tier 2 Grant 2016-T2-1-170 and a NRF fellowship. Part of the work was completed while Barnabé Monnot and Georgios Piliouras were visiting scientists at the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Engineering Systems and Design, Singapore University of Technology and Design, Singapore, Singapore

    Barnabé Monnot, Francisco Benita & Georgios Piliouras

Authors
  1. Barnabé Monnot
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  2. Francisco Benita
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  3. Georgios Piliouras
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Correspondence to Barnabé Monnot .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Microsoft Research, Redmond, Washington, USA

    Nikhil R. Devanur

  2. Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, Shanghai, China

    Pinyan Lu

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Monnot, B., Benita, F., Piliouras, G. (2017). Routing Games in the Wild: Efficiency, Equilibration and Regret. In: R. Devanur, N., Lu, P. (eds) Web and Internet Economics. WINE 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10660. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71924-5_24

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71924-5_24

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