Daily commuting

Workers generally commute on a daily basis, so we model commuting as a repeated game. The folk theorem implies that for sufficiently large discount factors the repeated commuting game has as a Nash equilibrium any strategy profile that is at least as good as the maximin strategy for a commuter in the one shot game, including the efficient ones. This result applies whether the game is static, in the sense that only routes are chosen as a strategy by commuters, or dynamic, where both routes and times of departure are chosen. Our conclusions pose a challenge to congestion pricing. We examine evidence from St. Louis to determine what equilibrium strategies are actually played in the repeated commuting game.