Trial-and-Error Congestion Pricing Scheme for Morning Commute Problem with Day-to-Day Dynamics

Abstract

A trial-and-error congestion pricing scheme finds the optimal toll based only on observable information (e.g., travel time) without information on travelers’ personal preferences that are often unobservable in practice (e.g., value of time, scheduling preference). This paper proposes a trial-and-error pricing scheme for the morning commute problem, also known as the departure time choice problem and Vickrey’s bottleneck model, with day-to-day dynamics. The proposed scheme is guaranteed to find the social optimal congestion toll under somewhat restrictive assumptions. We numerically confirm that the proposed scheme converges to the social optimal toll regardless of the parameter setting, and it decreased the social cost fairly quickly.