Selfish transportation games

Abstract

We study a natural strategic situation arising from the selection of shared means of transportation. Some clients (the players) are located on different nodes of a given graph and they want to be transported from their location to a common destination point (e.g. school, airport). A fixed number of resources (also called buses) is available and each client has to choose exactly one. Individual costs depend on the route chosen by the buses and the distance between the nodes. We investigate the case where each bus has a static permutation which prescribes the order by which the clients are visited.We identify the cases admitting a pure strategy equilibrium and consider the construction of an equilibrium, via a dedicated algorithm, or a dynamics. We also determine the price of anarchy and the price of stability for two natural social functions.