The Commuting Game

---

• 研討會日期 : 2010-08-24
• 時間 : 14:30
• 主講人 : Professor Marcus Berliant
• 地點 : B110
• 演講者簡介 : Marcus Berliant got his Ph.D. in Economics from University of California, Berkeley in 1982. He is currently serving as Professor of Economics and Fellow of Center in Political Economy at Washington University in St. Louis. His research field is in public finance, mathematical economics and urban economics.
• 演講摘要 : We examine commuting in a game-theoretic setting with a continuum of commuters. Commuters’ home and work locations can be heterogeneous. The transport network is arbitrary but exogenous. Traffic speed is determined by link capacity and by local congestion at a time and place along a link, where local congestion at a time and place is endogenous. Cars can catch up with others and slow them down. After formulating a static model, where consumers choose only routes to work, and a dynamic model, where they also choose departure times, we describe and examine existence of Nash equilibrium in both models and show that they differ, so prior claims about equivalence of the two models are false. Optima are shown to exist for both the static and dynamic models and are found to be different from the Nash equilibria in the respective models. Then it is shown via the folk theorem that for sufficiently large discount factors the repeated dynamic model has as equilibrium any strategy that is achievable in the one shot game with choice of departure times, including the efficient ones. Asimilar result holds for the static model, restricting to strategies in the one shot game that yield individually rational payoffs. Applicability of the anti-folk theorem is also discussed. In the end, our results pose a challenge to congestion pricing. Finally, we examine evidence from St. Louis to determine what equilibrium strategies are actually played in the repeated game.