New Study Reveals How App Routes Can Cost You Time and Money

New routing-game research examines competing mediators who recommend routes to fixed nonatomic populations. Each mediator chooses a randomized flow allocation to minimize its population’s expected travel cost, subject to users having no conditional expected gain above a tolerance ε from disregarding their recommendations.

The authors define a fragmented obedient equilibrium (FOE) by combining user obedience with mediator optimality and establish existence under a lower-hemicontinuity assumption on the obedient policy correspondences. Under affine edge latencies and independent mediator sampling, they derive an exact reformulation in first and second flow moments that preserves best responses and equilibrium profiles; every feasible moment pair admits a finitely supported realizing policy.

When the network has at most four routes, each mediator’s best-response problem is an exact semidefinite program. A numerical illustration on the Braess network shows that relaxing obedience can reduce FOE costs, while gaps relative to the social optimum and optimal obedient pooling can persist.