Braess' paradox: A cooperative game‐theoretic point of view

Braess' paradox is a classical result in the theory of congestion games. It motivates theoretically why adding resource (e.g., an arc) to network may sometimes worsen, rather than improve, overall performance. Differently from previous literature, which studies non-cooperative game-theoretic setting, this work, framework proposed investigate its occurrence by exploiting cooperative games with transferable utility (TU games) on networks. In way, instead focusing marginal contribution provided insertion arc when single initial scenario considered, average respect various scenarios, that is, Shapley value suitably-defined TU game, evaluated. shown that, for choices function game modeling congestion, there are cases associated negative, meaning negative.