We consider repeated routing games with piecewise-constant congestion taxing in which a central planner sets and announces the congestion taxes for fixed windows of time in advance. Specifically, congestion taxes are calculated using marginal congestion pricing based on the flow of the vehicles on each road prior to the beginning of the taxing window. The piecewise-constant taxing policy in motivated by that users or drivers may dislike fast-changing prices and that they also prefer prior knowledge of the prices. We prove that the multiplicative update rule converges to a socially optimal flow when using vanishing step sizes. Considering that the algorithm cannot adapt itself to a changing environment when using vanishing step sizes, we propose using constant step sizes in this case. Then, however, we can only prove the convergence of the dynamics to a neighborhood of the socially optimal flow (with its size being of the order of the selected step size).
QC 20160614