Fixing Urban Congestion with Dollars and Data

In many of the challenges faced by the modern world, from overcrowded road networks to overstretched healthcare systems, large benefits for society come about from small changes by very many individuals. We describe a framework for designing "nudge engines,” focusing on influencing commuter behavior to reduce urban congestion. The framework consists of monetarily incentivizing commuters to make off-peak trips using random, lottery-like rewards, and using data to provide “personalized nudges." We show how these ideas work using results from a series of pilots conducted in Bangalore, at Stanford, and in Singapore.

Speaker: Balaji Prabhakar, Stanford