We ask if it is possible to positively influence social behavior with no risk of unintentionally incentivizing pathological behavior. In network routing problems, if network traffic is composed of many individual agents, it is known that self-interested behavior among the agents can lead to suboptimal network congestion. We study situations in which a system planner charges monetary tolls for the use of network links in an effort to incentivize efficient routing choices by the users, but in which the users’ sensitivity to tolls is heterogeneous and unknown. We seek locally computed tolls that are guaranteed not to incentivize worse network routing than in the uninfluenced case. Our main result is to show that if networks are sufficiently complex and populations sufficiently diverse, perverse incentives cannot be systematically avoided: Any taxation mechanism that improves outcomes on one network must necessarily degrade them on another. Nonetheless, for the simple class of parallel networks, nonperverse taxes do exist; we fully characterize all such taxation mechanisms, showing that they are a generalized version of traditional marginal-cost tolls.

中文翻译：

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税收可以改善所有网络上的拥塞吗？

我们询问是否有可能积极影响社会行为，而没有无意间激发病理行为的风险。在网络路由问题中，如果网络流量由许多单独的代理组成，则众所周知，代理之间的自利行为可能导致网络拥塞不佳。我们研究了以下情况：系统规划人员对使用网络链接收取通行费，以激励用户进行有效的路由选择，但其中用户对通行费的敏感性异类且未知。我们寻求本地计算的通行费，以确保不会造成比不受影响的情况更糟糕的网络路由。我们的主要结果表明，如果网络足够复杂且人口足够多样化，则不能有系统地避免有害激励措施：任何改善一个网络结果的征税机制都必须使另一个网络的结果降级。但是，对于简单的并行网络类别，确实存在非正常税收。我们充分表征了所有此类征税机制，表明它们是传统边际成本通行费的通用版本。