Congestion Tolls as Utility Alignment Between Agent and System Optimum

In multi-agent systems, greedly agents can harm the per-formance of the overall system. This is the case of traffic commuting scenarios: drivers repete their actions trying to adapt to daily changes. In this domain, there are several proposals to achieve the traffic network equilibrium. Re-cently, the focus has shifted to information provision in sev-eral forms as a way to balance the load. Most of these works make strong assumptions such as the traffic author-ity and/or drivers having perfect information. In reality, the information the central control provides to drivers con-tains estimation errors. The goal of this paper is to pro-pose a socially efficient load balance by internalizing social costs caused by agents ’ actions. Two issues are addressed: the model of information provision accounts for informa-tion imperfectness, and the equilibrium which emerges out of drivers route choices is close to the system optimum due to mechanisms of road pricing. The model can then be used for traffic authorities to simulate the effects of information provision and toll charging