Selfish routing games with priority lanes

2026-02-06

AI Summary

This study addresses the inefficiency in traffic routing caused by users’ selfish behavior by proposing a voluntary priority lane mechanism. Under this scheme, users may voluntarily pay a fee to access a priority service that offers reduced latency. The mechanism is grounded in marginal external cost pricing and ensures incentive compatibility, aligning the Nash equilibrium flow with the socially optimal flow and thereby achieving a price of anarchy of one. Theoretical analysis demonstrates that, under linear latency functions, a unique equilibrium exists with uniquely determined edge latencies. By replacing mandatory congestion pricing with voluntary participation, this work provides an efficient and practical game-theoretic solution for achieving system optimality in traffic networks.

Technology Category

• Game Theory and Economic Paradigms: Mechanism Design
• Multiagent Systems: Mechanism Design
• Search and Optimization: Learning to Search

Application Category

• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Incentives in network design for Web infrastructures and ecosystems
• Security and Privacy: Large-scale security measurements
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: User privacy protection in personalized systems

Abstract

We study selfish routing games where users can choose between regular and priority service for each network edge on their chosen path. Priority users pay an additional fee, but in turn they may travel the edge prior to non-priority users, hence experiencing potentially less congestion. For this model, we establish existence of equilibria for linear latency functions and prove uniqueness of edge latencies, despite potentially different strategic choices in equilibrium. Our main contribution demonstrates that marginal cost pricing achieves system optimality: When priority fees equal marginal externality costs, the equilibrium flow coincides with the socially optimal flow, hence the price of anarchy equals $1$. This voluntary priority mechanism therefore provides an incentive-compatible alternative to mandatory congestion pricing, whilst achieving the same result. We also discuss the limitations of a uniform pricing scheme for the priority option.

Problem

• selfish routing
• priority lanes
• congestion pricing
• price of anarchy
• marginal cost pricing

Innovation

• selfish routing
• priority lanes
• marginal cost pricing
• price of anarchy
• congestion games