Congestion pricing using a raffle-based scheme

• Main Authors: Amin, Saurabh (Contributor), Loiseau, Patrick (Author), Schwartz, Galina (Author), Musacchio, John (Author), Sastry, S. Shankar (Author)
• Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (Contributor)
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), 2013-02-28T16:10:06Z.
• Subjects: Article
• Online Access: Get fulltext

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.
National Science Foundation (U.S.) (Grant CNS-0910711)
National Science Foundation (U.S.) (Grant CCF-0424422)
United States. Air Force Office of Scientific Research (FA9550-06-1-0244)