From Aggregate Observations to Social Optimum: An Adaptive Pricing Scheme in Heterogeneous Congestion Games

Shota Fujishima

Papers from arXiv.org

Abstract: This study investigates an adaptive pricing scheme aimed at achieving an efficient state in a traffic congestion game characterized by a diverse population of road users. While the planner possesses knowledge of players' preferences, their ability to observe only aggregate states limits the implementation of differentiated taxes. We propose a pricing approach that aligns taxes with the true values of externalities over time, ensuring global stability of the social optimum through replicator dynamics. Our findings suggest that the planner, despite being unable to accurately assess externalities at each moment, can still navigate the economy toward a long-term social optimum by adjusting the disaggregated state based on aggregate observations, while acknowledging the challenges posed by heterogeneous value of time (VOT) among drivers. We also find that a pricing mechanism that incorporates the current externalities for each period, which could be executed by a planner with full access to the disaggregated state, might fail to achieve the global stability of the social optimum under the same dynamics.

Date: 2025-12
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.17157 Latest version (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:arx:papers:2512.17157

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Papers from arXiv.org
Bibliographic data for series maintained by arXiv administrators ().