Citation

Youn H, Gastner MT, Jeong H. Phys. Rev. Lett. 2008; 101(12): 128701.

Affiliation

Department of Physics, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Daejeon 305-701, Korea.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2008, American Physical Society)

DOI

unavailable

PMID

18851419

Abstract

Uncoordinated individuals in human society pursuing their personally optimal strategies do not always achieve the social optimum, the most beneficial state to the society as a whole. Instead, strategies form Nash equilibria which are often socially suboptimal. Society, therefore, has to pay a price of anarchy for the lack of coordination among its members. Here we assess this price of anarchy by analyzing the travel times in road networks of several major cities. Our simulation shows that uncoordinated drivers possibly waste a considerable amount of their travel time. Counterintuitively, simply blocking certain streets can partially improve the traffic conditions. We analyze various complex networks and discuss the possibility of similar paradoxes in physics.

Language: en