Altruism Improves Congestion in Series-Parallel Nonatomic Congestion Games

Self-interested routing polices from individual users in a system can collectively lead to poor aggregate congestion in routing networks. The introduction of altruistic agents, whose goal is to benefit other agents in the system, can seemingly improve aggregate congestion. However, it is known in that in some network routing problems, altruistic agents can actually worsen congestion compared to that which would arise in the presence of a homogeneously selfish population. This paper provides a thorough investigation into the necessary conditions for altruists to be guaranteed to improve total congestion. In particular, we study the class of series-parallel non-atomic congestion games, where one sub-population is altruistic and the other is selfish. We find that a game is guaranteed to have improved congestion in the presence of altruistic agents (even if only a small part of the total population) compared to the homogeneously selfish version of the game, provided the network is symmetric, where all agents are given access to all paths in the network, and the series-parallel network for the game does not have sub-networks which emulate Braess's paradox – a phenomenon we refer to as a Braess-resistant network. Our results appear to be the most complete characterization of when behavior that is designed to improve total congestion (which we refer to as altruism) is actually guaranteed to do so.