  In many real-world strategic settings, people use information displays to
make decisions. In these settings, an information provider chooses which
information to provide to strategic agents and how to present it, and agents
formulate a best response based on the information and their anticipation of
how others will behave. We contribute the results of a controlled online
experiment to examine how the provision and presentation of information impacts
people's decisions in a congestion game. Our experiment compares how different
visualization approaches for displaying this information, including bar charts
and hypothetical outcome plots, and different information conditions, including
where the visualized information is private versus public (i.e., available to
all agents), affect decision making and welfare. We characterize the effects of
visualization anticipation, referring to changes to behavior when an agent goes
from alone having access to a visualization to knowing that others also have
access to the visualization to guide their decisions. We also empirically
identify the visualization equilibrium, i.e., the visualization for which the
visualized outcome of agents' decisions matches the realized decisions of the
agents who view it. We reflect on the implications of visualization equilibria
and visualization anticipation for designing information displays for
real-world strategic settings.
