Competitive mediator games and urban CAV routing markets
2026-08-10 • Computer Science and Game Theory
Computer Science and Game TheoryMultiagent Systems
AI summaryⓘ
The authors introduce a new kind of game called competitive mediator games to study future markets where autonomous routing and driving services compete. These games extend existing equilibrium concepts that can lead to better outcomes for everyone compared to traditional Nash equilibria. They show that in typical routing scenarios, if one mediator (service provider) is slightly better liked by all users, it will dominate the market completely. The authors then discuss how these findings relate to real-world ARAD service markets and consider what future rules could manage these markets.
competitive mediator gamescoarse correlated equilibriaNash equilibriaanonymous congestion gamesautonomous routingmarket-share maximizationmulti-agent learningequilibriummechanism designARAD (autonomous routing and driving)
Authors
Grzegorz Jamróz
Abstract
Inspired by possible future markets of autonomous routing and driving (ARAD), we introduce competitive mediator games and their equilibria which generalize the (coarse) correlated equilibria, which have become a popular research area recently as they not only can be more socially efficient than Nash equilibria but also are limits of algorithmic no-regret multi-agent learning dynamics. We discuss the basic properties of competitive mediator games and prove that in the generic setting of anonymous congestion(routing) games with market-share maximizing mediators all competitive mediator equilibria are monopolies whenever one of the mediators is weakly preferred to other mediators by all users. We apply and interpret these results in the context of new markets of competing ARAD service providers. We also provide a comprehensive overview of these markets and discuss the future mechanism design thereof.