Routing Games in the Wild: Efficiency, Equilibration and Regret - Large-Scale Field Experiments in Singapore

Routing games are amongst the most well studied domains of game theory. How relevant are these pen-and-paper calculations to understanding the reality of everyday traffic routing? We focus on a semantically rich dataset that captures detailed information about the daily behavior of thousands of Singaporean commuters and examine the following basic questions: – Does the traffic equilibrate? – Is the system behavior consistent with latency minimizing agents? – Is the resulting system efficient? In order to capture the efficiency of the traffic network in a way that agrees with our everyday intuition we introduce a new metric, the stress of catastrophe, which reflects the combined inefficiencies of both tragedy of the commons as well as price of anarchy effects.