RAISE the Bar: Restriction of Action Spaces for Improved Social Welfare and Equity in Traffic Management

Restriction-based governance has recently been proposed as an alternative to reward shaping for achieving system-level goals in competitive multi-agent systems. In this work, we apply these two approaches to the domain of traffic management, specifically investigating their efficacy and fairness. Our results show that edge restrictions in congested traffic networks are superior to dynamic pricing with regard to equity (i.e., equal treatment of agents) while achieving comparable travel-time improvements. We argue that the former metric, as an adequate proxy for fairness, can be crucial for the quality and acceptance of a governance scheme, particularly when human agents are affected.