Optimal Taxes in Atomic Congestion Games

TL;DR

This paper develops a linear programming approach to design tolling mechanisms in atomic congestion games, achieving near-optimal efficiency using only local information, with applications to traffic routing and load balancing.

Contribution

It introduces a tractable LP formulation for optimal toll design in atomic congestion games, extending results to polynomial cases and generalizing previous work on tolling mechanisms.

Findings

Optimal tolls minimize system inefficiency in congestion games.

Local information-based tolls perform nearly as well as global information mechanisms.

Marginal cost mechanism has lower efficiency than no toll in the studied setting.

Abstract

How can we design mechanisms to promote efficient use of shared resources? Here, we answer this question in relation to the well-studied class of atomic congestion games, used to model a variety of problems, including traffic routing. Within this context, a methodology for designing tolling mechanisms that minimize the system inefficiency (price of anarchy) exploiting solely local information is so far missing in spite of the scientific interest. In this manuscript we resolve this problem through a tractable linear programming formulation that applies to and beyond polynomial congestion games. When specializing our approach to the polynomial case, we obtain tight values for the optimal price of anarchy and corresponding tolls, uncovering an unexpected link with load balancing games. We also derive optimal tolling mechanisms that are constant with the congestion level, generalizing the results of Caragiannis et al. [ACM Transactions on Algorithms, 2010] to polynomial congestion games and beyond. Finally, we apply our techniques to compute the efficiency of the marginal cost mechanism. Surprisingly, optimal tolling mechanism using only local information perform closely to existing mechanism that utilize global information [Bil\`o and Vinci, ACM Transactions on Economics and Computation, 2019], while the marginal cost mechanism, known to be optimal in the continuous-flow model, has lower efficiency than that encountered levying no toll. All results are tight for pure Nash equilibria, and extend to coarse correlated equilibria.