2021/09/13 by Jasper Verbree, Verbree, Jasper, Ashish Cherukuri +1
Decision Sciences · Economics, Econometrics and Finance · Social Sciences · #Computer Science and Game Theory (cs.GT) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #FOS: Electrical engineering #FOS: Mathematics #Game Theory and Applications #Game Theory and Voting Systems #Optimization and Control (math.OC) #Systems and Control (eess.SY) #Transportation Planning and Optimization #electronic engineering #information engineering
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2109.05895
openalex publication_date 2021/09/13 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
This paper considers Bayesian persuasion for routing games where information about the uncertain state of the network is provided by a traffic information system (TIS) using public signals. In this setup, the TIS commits to a signalling scheme and participants form a posterior belief about the state of the network based on prior beliefs and the received signal. They subsequently select routes minimizing their individual expected travel time under their posterior beliefs, giving rise to a Wardrop equilibrium. We investigate how the TIS can infer the prior beliefs held by the participants by designing suitable signalling schemes, and observing the equilibrium flows under different signals. We show that under mild conditions a signalling scheme that allows for exact inference of the prior exists. We then provide an iterative algorithm that finds such a scheme in a finite number of steps. We show that schemes designed by our algorithm are robust, in the sense that they can still identify the prior after a small enough perturbation. We also investigate the case where the population is divided among multiple priors, and give conditions under which the fraction associated to each prior can be identified. Several examples illustrate our results.