Traffic Routing under Driver Distrust

Abstract

Traditional strategic information design literature assumes receivers trust the signals shared by the sender, the sender and receivers have symmetric information at the outset of the interaction, and receivers update their beliefs according to Bayes rule. In our work, we consider an interaction between a smart navigation system and multiple drivers as a Stackelberg game within a traffic network in which the leader may perturb traffic information shared with selfish receivers to reach a system-optimal routing outcome that minimizes network congestion. We propose a framework that deviates from the traditional assumptions of the strategic information design framework to better mimic real-world human behavior and consider conditions under which a sender shares deceptive information with a receiver.