On Partial Adoption of Vehicle-to-Vehicle Communication: When Should Cars Warn Each Other of Hazards?

TL;DR

This paper models how partial adoption of V2V communication can unintentionally increase accidents and social costs, highlighting complex effects of information sharing among vehicles.

Contribution

It introduces a novel game-theoretic model analyzing the impact of partial V2V adoption on road safety and congestion, revealing counterintuitive outcomes.

Findings

V2V sharing can increase accident frequency in equilibrium.

Partial V2V adoption may lead to higher social costs.

Information sharing effects depend on model parameters.

Abstract

The emerging technology of Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communication over vehicular ad hoc networks promises to improve road safety by allowing vehicles to autonomously warn each other of road hazards. However, research on other transportation information systems has shown that informing only a subset of drivers of road conditions may have a perverse effect of increasing congestion. In the context of a simple (yet novel) model of V2V hazard information sharing, we ask whether partial adoption of this technology can similarly lead to undesirable outcomes. In our model, drivers individually choose how recklessly to behave as a function of information received from other V2V-enabled cars, and the resulting aggregate behavior influences the likelihood of accidents (and thus the information propagated by the vehicular network). We fully characterize the game-theoretic equilibria of this model. Our model indicates that for a wide range of our parameter space, V2V information sharing surprisingly increases the equilibrium frequency of accidents relative to no V2V information sharing, and that it may increase equilibrium social cost as well.