To steer the behavior of selfish, resource-sharing agents in a socio-technical system towards the direction of higher efficiency, the system designer requires accurate models of both agent behaviors and the underlying system infrastructure. For instance, traffic controllers often use road latency models to design tolls whose deployment can effectively mitigate traffic congestion. However, misspecifications of system parameters may restrict a system designer's ability to influence collective agent behavior toward efficient outcomes. In this work, we study the impact of system misspecifications on toll design for atomic congestion games. We prove that tolls designed under sufficiently minor system misspecifications, when deployed, do not introduce new Nash equilibria in atomic congestion games compared to tolls designed in the noise-free setting, implying a form of local robustness. We then upper bound the degree to which the worst-case equilibrium system performance could decrease when tolls designed under a given level of system misspecification are deployed. We validate our theoretical results via Monte-Carlo simulations as well as realizations of our worst-case guarantees.

翻译：为引导社会中自私且共享资源的智能体行为向更高效率方向演进，系统设计者需要同时建立智能体行为与底层系统基础设施的精确模型。例如，交通管理者常使用道路延迟模型设计通行费，其部署可有效缓解交通拥堵。然而，系统参数的误设可能限制系统设计者影响集体智能体行为以实现高效结果的能力。本文研究系统误设对原子拥塞博弈通行费设计的影响。我们证明：在足够轻微的误设条件下设计的通行费，其部署后不会在原子拥塞博弈中引入新纳什均衡，这体现了一种局部鲁棒性。随后，我们给出了在给定系统误设水平下部署所设计通行费时，最坏情况下均衡系统性能下降程度的上界。通过蒙特卡洛模拟及最坏情况保障的实际实现，验证了我们的理论结果。