To observe or not to observe: Queuing game framework for urban parking

Abstract

We model parking in urban centers as a set of parallel queues and overlay a game theoretic structure. We model arriving drivers as utility maximizers and consider two games: one in which it is free to observe the queue length and one in which it is not. Not only do we compare the Nash induced welfare to the socially optimal welfare, confirming the usual result that Nash is worse for society, we also show that by other performance metrics more commonly used in transportation- such as occupancy and time spent circling-the Nash solution is suboptimal. We find that gains to welfare do not require everyone to observe. Through simulation, we explore a more complex scenario where drivers decide based the queueing game whether or not to enter a collection of queues over a network. Our simulated models use parameters informed by real-world data collected by the Seattle Department of Transportation.

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