Evolutionary game analysis of pedestrian-autonomous vehicle interactions at unsignalized road sections: a policy intervention perspective

ABSTRACT

Focusing on the crossing scenarios of pedestrians and autonomous vehicles (AVs) at unsignalized road sections, this study proposes an evolutionary game model considering the related benefits of AVs, pedestrians and traffic managers, and it explores the impact of policy intervention. The game analysis results indicate that strategies of the three agents are closely associated with pedestrians’ trust in driverless technology, human-vehicle communication and government regulation. In cases where regulation exists, increasing the AV supervision threat would facilitate the equilibrium to evolve toward pedestrians crossing and AVs yielding. In addition, we unexpectedly find that the introduction of crash probability information cannot boost the equilibrium outcomes in the expected direction, which may be related to information overload. Finally, this study verifies the validity of the model through numerical simulations and provides managerial implications with respect to driverless technology promotion, communication device design and regulatory policy formulation.

KEYWORDS:

• Autonomous vehicles
• driverless technology
• government regulation
• pedestrian trust
• human-vehicle communication
• equilibrium analysis

Acknowledgments

We thank the anonymous reviewers and the editor for their reviews and thoughtful suggestions, which helped improve the quality of the paper. The study was funded by the Tianjin Research Innovation Project for Postgraduate Students under Grant No. 2020YJSB021 and Humanity and Social Science Youth Foundation of Ministry of Education of China under Grant No. 22YJC630189.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-54175359.

2. https://spectrum.ieee.org/transportation/self-driving/the-big-problem-with-selfdriving-cars-is-people

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the NSFC Project of International Cooperation and Exchanges [72010107004]; Humanities and Social Sciences Youth Foundation, Ministry of Education of the People’s Republic of China [22YJC630189]; Tianjin Research Innovation Project for Postgraduate Students [2020YJSB021].