Download Equilibrium in the bottleneck model with large and small

Department of Industrial & Systems Engineering, NUS,
Singapore
SEMINAR
on
Equilibrium in the bottleneck model with large and small
users
Speaker:
Professor Robin Lindsey, CN Chair in Transportation and International Logistics,
Operations and Logistics Division, Sauder School of Business, University of British
Columbia
Date:
Thursday, 19 January 2017
Time:
10:00 am to 11:30 am
Venue:
EA-06-02, Faculty of Engineering, NUS
Abstract:
In most of the literature on traffic congestion it is assumed that users are “small” in
the sense that each one controls a negligible fraction of total traffic. However, large
users are often prevalent. These include major interurban freight shippers, urban
goods delivery companies, and postal services. Furthermore, major employers such
as government departments and large corporations can add substantially to traffic on
certain roads at peak times. Large users have an incentive to internalize the
congestion delays their own vehicles impose on each other, and it is natural to
consider how this affects their travel-related decisions. Using the Bottleneck Model,
Silva et al. (2016)* have recently shown that a pure strategy Nash equilibrium
(PSNE) in departure times may not exist. Candidate PSNE are upset because large
users can gain by rescheduling a mass of vehicles at a particular instant in order to
“hog” bottleneck capacity.
Silva et al. (2016) restrict attention to two large users controlling identical vehicles
with linear trip-timing preferences. In this paper we extend consideration to settings
with both large and small users and more general preferences. We show that PSNE
can be restored when the model is generalized in any one of three ways: (1) when
vehicles differ in their preferred arrival times, (2) when large users are constrained in
the rate at which their vehicle fleets can depart, and (3) when large users have
altruistic preferences (i.e., they attach some weight to the trip costs of other users). In
each case, the generalization weakens the incentive or ability of large users to
reschedule vehicles en masse. In addition to these results we show that selfinternalization of congestion can make a large user worse off, other users worse off,
and users in aggregate worse off. Thus, paradoxically, self-internalization can be
counterproductive.
* Silva, H., R. Lindsey, A. de Palma and V. van den Berg (2016), On the existence
and uniqueness of equilibrium in the Bottleneck Model with atomic users,
Transportation Science, Published online in Articles in Advance on August 11.
Biography:
Robin Lindsey holds the CN Chair in Transportation and International Logistics at
the Sauder School of Business, University of British Columbia. His research
interests include traffic congestion, road pricing, financing roads and other
transportation infrastructure, urban public transportation and advanced traveler
information systems. He is a founding board member and immediate past president
of
the
International
Transportation
Economics
Association
(http://www.iteaweb.org), an Associate Editor of Transportation Research Part B
and Transportmetrica, and a member of the editorial boards of Economics of
Transportation, International Journal of Sustainable Transportation, Journal of Urban
Economics, and Transport Policy. He is also coeditor with André de Palma, Emile
Quinet and Roger Vickerman of Handbook in Transport Economics published in
2011 by Edward Elgar.
Information: email: [email protected]
Fax: 6777-1434