2025/05/17 by Chih-Yuan Chiu, Chiu, Chih-Yuan, Bryce L. Ferguson +1
Decision Sciences · Engineering · Social Sciences · #Computer Science and Game Theory (cs.GT) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #FOS: Electrical engineering #Game Theory and Applications #Systems and Control (eess.SY) #Traffic control and management #Transportation Planning and Optimization #electronic engineering #information engineering
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2505.11791
openalex publication_date 2025/05/17 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01
To steer the behavior of selfish, resource-sharing agents in a socio-technical system towards the direction of higher efficiency, the system designer requires accurate models of both agent behaviors and the underlying system infrastructure. For instance, traffic controllers often use road latency models to design tolls whose deployment can effectively mitigate traffic congestion. However, misspecifications of system parameters may restrict a system designer's ability to influence collective agent behavior toward efficient outcomes. In this work, we study the impact of system misspecifications on toll design for atomic congestion games. We prove that tolls designed under sufficiently minor system misspecifications, when deployed, do not introduce new Nash equilibria in atomic congestion games compared to tolls designed in the noise-free setting, implying a form of local robustness. We then upper bound the degree to which the worst-case equilibrium system performance could decrease when tolls designed under a given level of system misspecification are deployed. We validate our theoretical results via Monte-Carlo simulations as well as realizations of our worst-case guarantees.