Routing games in the wild: Efficiency, equilibration and regret: Large-scale field experiments in Singapore

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.