Are rewards or penalties more effective in influencing user behavior? This work compares the effectiveness of subsidies and tolls in incentivizing user behavior in congestion games. The predominantly studied method of influencing user behavior in network routing problems is to institute taxes which alter users' observed costs in a manner that causes their self-interested choices to more closely align with a system-level objective. Another conceivable method to accomplish the same goal is to subsidize the users' actions that are preferable from a system-level perspective. We show that, when users behave similarly and predictably, subsidies offer superior performance guarantees to tolls under similar budgetary constraints; however, in the presence of unknown player heterogeneity, subsidies fail to offer the same robustness as tolls.

中文翻译：

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拥堵游戏中补贴和通行费的有效性

奖励或罚款在影响用户行为方面更有效吗？这项工作比较了补贴和通行费在激励拥挤游戏中的用户行为方面的有效性。在网络路由问题中影响用户行为的主要研究方法是征收税款，从而改变用户的观察成本，从而使他们的自利选择与系统级目标更加紧密地吻合。从系统级的角度来看，实现相同目标的另一种可能的方法是补贴用户的操作。我们表明，当用户的行为相似且可预测时，补贴将为在类似预算约束下的通行费提供更好的性能保证；但是，在存在未知的玩家异质性的情况下，补贴无法提供与通行费相同的稳健性。