Abstract
As an interdisciplinary topic, human travel-choice behavior has attracted the interests of transportation managers, theoretical computer science researchers and economists. Recent studies on tacit coordination in iterated route choice games (i.e., a large number of subjects could achieve the transportation network equilibrium in limited rounds) have been driven by two questions. (1) Will learning behavior promote tacit coordination in route choice games? (2) Which learning model can best account for these choices/behaviors? To answer the first question, we choose a set of learning models and conduct extensive simulations to determine their success in accounting for major behavioral patterns. To answer the second question, we compare these models to one another by competitively testing their predictions on four different datasets. Although all the selected models account reasonably well for the slow convergence of the mean route choice to equilibrium, they account only moderately well for the mean frequencies of the round-to-round switches from one route to another and fail to appropriately account for substantial individual differences. The implications of these findings for model construction and testing are briefly discussed.
Highlights
In both transportation and communication networks, where the route choices are decentralized, utility-maximizing players facing strategic uncertainty often strive to avoid congestion [1]
(1) Will learning behavior promote tacit coordination in route choice games? (2) Which learning model can best account for these choices/behaviors? To answer the first question, we choose a set of learning models and conduct extensive simulations to determine their success in accounting for major behavioral patterns
A minor reason to proceed with such simulations of the dynamic process is to complement or strengthen the results based on the maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) method, in which decisions in two successive rounds are assumed to be mutually independent while learning processes are always dependent on time and history
Summary
In both transportation and communication networks, where the route choices are decentralized, utility-maximizing players facing strategic uncertainty often strive to avoid congestion [1]. We selected four datasets that vary from one another in their research purpose, the architecture of the network, sources of uncertainty, and the number of iterations of the stage game, and compared them to one another in terms of the following two behavioral regularities. These include (1) gradual convergence to equilibria, as the mean route choice frequencies approach – but do not necessarily reach – an equilibrium point that is unique up to permutations of the players; and (2) non-increasing fluctuations over time, namely, changes in the mean number of round-to-round switches from one route to another.
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