This Article Full Text (PDF) References Alert me when this article is cited Alert me if a correction is posted Services Email this article to a friend Similar articles in this journal Alert me to new issues of the journal Download to citation manager Citing Articles Citing Articles via HighWire Citing Articles via Google Scholar Google Scholar Articles by Konishi, H. Search for Related Content

Uniqueness of User Equilibrium in Transportation Networks with Heterogeneous Commuters

Department of Economics, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts 02467
hideo.konishi{at}bc.edu

This paper discusses the uniqueness of user equilibrium in transportation networks with heterogeneous commuters. Daganzo (1983) proved the uniqueness of (stochastic) user equilibrium when commuters have heterogeneous tastes over possible paths, but identical disutility functions from time costs. We first show, by example, that his result may not apply in general networks if disutility functions are allowed to differ. However, for "simple" transportation networks, we show that user equilibrium is always unique and weakly Pareto efficient (cf. the Braess example) for a general class of utility functions. We investigate whether this result applies to more general networks. We also show that user equilibrium is unique in a dynamic bottleneck model with a simple network. We discuss an interesting relationship between the following two problems: the existence of user equilibrium in a finite model and the uniqueness of user equilibrium in a continuum model. In the appendix, we also provide a proof of a slightly generalized version of Daganzo's theorem.

Key Words: traffic equilibrium; heterogeneous users; uniqueness; efficiency; bottleneck model; game theory
History: Received: March 2001; revised: March 2002; accepted: July 2002.

This article has been cited by other articles:

				I. Milchtaich Topological Conditions for Uniqueness of Equilibrium in Networks Mathematics of Operations Research, February 1, 2005; 30(1): 225 - 244. [Abstract] [PDF]