Pricing Games in Networks

Опубликовано 6 сентября 2016, 16:55

Network games play a fundamental role in understanding behaviour in many domains, ranging from communication networks through markets to social networks. In this talk we will study in which individual buyers and sellers trade through intermediaries. Typically, not all buyers and sellers have access to the same intermediaries, and they trade at correspondingly different prices that reflect their relative amounts of power in the market. We model this phenomenon using a game in which buyers, sellers, and traders engage in trade on a graph that represents the access each buyer and seller has to the traders. In this model, traders set prices strategically, and then buyers and sellers react to the prices they are offered. We show that all equilibria lead to an efficient (i.e. socially optimal) allocation of goods, and study how the profits obtained by the traders depend on the underlying topology, thus providing a graph-theoretic basis for quantifying the amount of competition among traders. The talk is based on joint work with Larry Blume, David Easley, and Jon Kleinberg.