On the Convergence of Tâtonnement for Linear Fisher Markets

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Nan, Tianlong, Gao, Yuan, Kroer, Christian
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Nan, Tianlong
Gao, Yuan
Kroer, Christian
author_facet Nan, Tianlong
Gao, Yuan
Kroer, Christian
contents Tâtonnement is a simple, intuitive market process where prices are iteratively adjusted based on the difference between demand and supply. Many variants under different market assumptions have been studied and shown to converge to a market equilibrium, in some cases at a fast rate. However, the classical case of linear Fisher markets have long eluded the analyses, and it remains unclear whether tâtonnement converges in this case. We show that, for a sufficiently small step size, the prices given by the tâtonnement process are guaranteed to converge to equilibrium prices, up to a small approximation radius that depends on the stepsize. To achieve this, we consider the dual Eisenberg-Gale convex program in the price space, view tâtonnement as subgradient descent on this convex program, and utilize last-iterate convergence results for subgradient descent under error bound conditions. In doing so, we show that the convex program satisfies a particular error bound condition, the quadratic growth condition, and that the price sequence generated by tâtonnement is bounded above and away from zero. We also show that a similar convergence result holds for tâtonnement in quasi-linear Fisher markets. Numerical experiments are conducted to demonstrate that the theoretical linear convergence aligns with empirical observations.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2406_12526
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle On the Convergence of Tâtonnement for Linear Fisher Markets
Nan, Tianlong
Gao, Yuan
Kroer, Christian
Computer Science and Game Theory
Multiagent Systems
Optimization and Control
Tâtonnement is a simple, intuitive market process where prices are iteratively adjusted based on the difference between demand and supply. Many variants under different market assumptions have been studied and shown to converge to a market equilibrium, in some cases at a fast rate. However, the classical case of linear Fisher markets have long eluded the analyses, and it remains unclear whether tâtonnement converges in this case. We show that, for a sufficiently small step size, the prices given by the tâtonnement process are guaranteed to converge to equilibrium prices, up to a small approximation radius that depends on the stepsize. To achieve this, we consider the dual Eisenberg-Gale convex program in the price space, view tâtonnement as subgradient descent on this convex program, and utilize last-iterate convergence results for subgradient descent under error bound conditions. In doing so, we show that the convex program satisfies a particular error bound condition, the quadratic growth condition, and that the price sequence generated by tâtonnement is bounded above and away from zero. We also show that a similar convergence result holds for tâtonnement in quasi-linear Fisher markets. Numerical experiments are conducted to demonstrate that the theoretical linear convergence aligns with empirical observations.
title On the Convergence of Tâtonnement for Linear Fisher Markets
topic Computer Science and Game Theory
Multiagent Systems
Optimization and Control
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.12526