Road Traffic Congestion and Public Information: An Experimental Investigation.

This paper reports laboratory experiments designed to study the impact ofpublic information about past departure rates on congestion levels and travel costs. Our design is based on a discrete version of Arnott et al.'s (1990) bottleneck model. In all treatments, congestion occurs and the observed travel costs are quite similar to the predicted ones. Subjects' capacity to coordinate is not affected by the availability of public informationon past departure rates, by the number of drivers or by the relative costof delay. This seemingly absence of treatment effects is confirmed by ourfinding that a parameter-free reinforcement learning model best characterises individual behaviour. (Author/publisher).