Poster
Learning Optimal Tax Design in Nonatomic Congestion Games
Qiwen Cui · Maryam Fazel · Simon Du
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Abstract
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Thu 12 Dec 11 a.m. PST
— 2 p.m. PST
Abstract:
It is known that self-interested behavior among the players can damage the system's efficiency. Tax mechanism is a common method to alleviate this issue and induce socially optimal behavior. In this work, we take the initial step for learning the optimal tax that can minimize the social cost with limited feedback. We propose a new type of feedback named \emph{equilibrium feedback}, where the tax designer can only observe the Nash equilibrium. Existing algorithms are not applicable due to the exponentially large tax function space, nonexistence of the gradient, and nonconvexity of the objective. To tackle these challenges, our algorithm leverages several novel components: (1) piece-wise linear tax to approximate the optimal tax; (2) an extra linear term to guarantee a strongly convex potential function; (3) efficient subroutine to find the ``boundary'' tax. The algorithm can find an $\epsilon$-optimal tax with $O(\beta F^2/\epsilon)$ sample complexity, where $\beta$ is the smoothness of the cost function and $F$ is the number of facilities.
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