Unfortunately, Waze has at least two incentives not to provide socially optimal paths. First, individuals would have an incentive to find individually-optimal paths by using a different app that provides them. Second, it seems likely that more people turn Waze on when traffic is bad, so social suboptimality might actually be good for Waze.<p>On the other hand, with socially optimal traffic patterns there would be induced demand and more drivers would come on the roads and potentially use Waze.<p>It&#x27;s actually difficult to know what would make Waze better off, providing socially optimal routes or individually optimal routes.<p>Waze might also behave like many companies and ask for subsidies from local governments for turning on the social optimization, and the local governments are ill-equiped to know how much to pay.