Uncoordinated individuals in human society pursuing their personally optimalstrategies do not always achieve the social optimum, the most beneficial stateto the society as a whole. Instead, strategies form Nash equilibria which areoften socially suboptimal. Society, therefore, has to pay a price of anarchyfor the lack of coordination among its members. Here we assess this price ofanarchy by analyzing the travel times in road networks of several major cities.Our simulation shows that uncoordinated drivers possibly waste a considerableamount of their travel time. Counterintuitively,simply blocking certain streetscan partially improve the traffic conditions. We analyze various complexnetworks and discuss the possibility of similar paradoxes in physics.
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