The Design and Analysis of a Mobility Game

In this paper, we study a routing and travel-mode choice problem for mobility systems with a multimodal transportation network as a ``mobility game" with coupled action sets. We develop a game-theoretic framework to study the impact on efficiency of the travelers' behavioral decision making. In our framework, we introduce a mobility ``pricing mechanism" in which we model traffic congestion using linear cost functions while also considering the waiting times at different transport hubs. We show that travelers' selfish actions lead to a pure-strategy Nash equilibrium. We then perform a Price of Anarchy analysis to establish that the mobility system's inefficiencies remain relatively low as the number of travelers increases. We deviate from the standard game-theoretic analysis of decision making by extending our modeling framework to capture the subjective behavior of travelers using prospect theory. Finally, we provide a simulation study as a proof of concept for our proposed mobility game.