Information Design for a Non-atomic Service Scheduling Game

TL;DR

This paper investigates how information can be optimally designed and communicated to agents in a non-atomic service scheduling game to minimize social costs, using theoretical analysis and computational methods.

Contribution

It characterizes equilibria under different information regimes and formulates the information design as a generalized problem of moments for numerical solutions.

Findings

Full information can be optimal under certain conditions.

Signaling strategies influence agents' joining times and social costs.

Computational tools effectively solve the information design problem.

Abstract

We study an information design problem for a non-atomic service scheduling game. The service starts at a random time and there is a continuum of agent population who have a prior belief about the service start time but do not observe the actual realization of it. The agents want to make decisions of when to join the queue in order to avoid long waits in the queue or not to arrive earlier than the service has started. There is a planner who knows when the service starts and makes suggestions to the agents about when to join the queue through an obedient direct signaling strategy, in order to minimize the average social cost. We characterize the full information and the no information equilibria and we show in what conditions it is optimal for the planner to reveal the full information to the agents. Further, by imposing appropriate assumptions on the model, we formulate the information design problem as a generalized problem of moments (GPM) and use computational tools developed for such problems to solve the problem numerically.