Congestion pricing using a raffle-based scheme

We propose a raffle-based scheme for the decongestion of a shared resource. Our scheme builds on ideas from the economic literature on incentivizing contributions to a public good. We formulate a game-theoretic model for the decongestion problem in a setup with a finite number of users, as well as i...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Amin, Saurabh, Loiseau, Patrick, Schwartz, Galina, Musacchio, John, Sastry, S. Shankar
Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Format: Article
Language:en_US
Published: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) 2013
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/77233
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1554-015X
Description
Summary:We propose a raffle-based scheme for the decongestion of a shared resource. Our scheme builds on ideas from the economic literature on incentivizing contributions to a public good. We formulate a game-theoretic model for the decongestion problem in a setup with a finite number of users, as well as in a setup with an infinite number of non-atomic users. We analyze both setups, and show that the former converges toward the latter when the number of users becomes large. We compare our results to existing results for the public good provision problem. Overall, our results establish that raffle-based schemes are useful in addressing congestion problems.