The week's events
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Seminar Bryce Ferguson: "Information and Influence: Overcoming and Exploiting Uncertainty in Congestion Games"
Seminar Bryce Ferguson: "Information and Influence: Overcoming and Exploiting Uncertainty in Congestion Games"
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October 27, 2022Bryce Ferguson (https://web.ece.ucsb.edu/~blf/)Title: Information and Influence: Overcoming and Exploiting Uncertainty in Congestion GamesAbstract: In large-scale, socio-technical systems (such as traffic networks, power grids, supply chains, etc.) the operating efficiency depends heavily on the actions of human users. It is well known that when users act in their own self-interest, system performance can be sub-optimal. Our capabilities in alleviating this inefficiency rely on our knowledge of user decision making and various system parameters. In this talk, I will present two settings where information affects our ability to influence system performance. In the first, we consider designing monetary incentives for players in a congestion game without exact knowledge of users’ price-sensitivity or path latency-characteristics; we provide a comparison of the effectiveness of different incentive types and quantify the value of different pieces of information. In the second, we consider a flipped paradigm, where the system operator has more information about system parameters than the users and can selectively reveal pertinent information. We show, in the context of Bayesian-congestion games, that signaling information to users has the opportunity to improve system performance but also the capability to make performance worse than if no information were shared at all. We then show the advantages of concurrently using monetary incentives and information signals by providing bounds on the benefit to system performance and methods to find optimal mechanisms of each type.Bâtiment IMAG (406)Saint-Martin-d'Hères, 38400France
