Cooperation in the Design of Public Goods

Abstract

We consider the cooperative elements that arise in the design of public goods, such as transportation policies and infrastructure. These design processes involve a wide variety of stakeholders: government, busineses, advocates, and at the heart of it all transportation users. As such, their eventual deployment (or lack thereof) is critically dependent on the decision-maker's ability to garner sufficient support from each of these groups. We formalize these strategic requirements from the perspective of cooperative game theory. Specifically, we study non-transfearable utility (NTU) linear programming (LP) games, which combine the game-theoretic tensions inherent in public decision-making with the modeling flexibility of mathematical programming. We derive general conditions under which social cooperation is possible (i.e., conditions under which the core of NTU LP games is non-empty), results on the complexity of associated computational tasks, and devise computational solution methods. To illustrate the practical merits of this theory, we perform a numerical, data-driven implementation in the area of public transit network design. In particular, we demonstrate how the (often) conflicting design objectives of maximizing ridership and maximizing coverage fuse with the distribution of quality of service, ultimately giving rise to power dynamics that can significantly constrain the design space of a transit planner.