Price Competition in Linear Fisher Markets: Stability, Equilibrium and Personalization

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Li, Juncheng, Tang, Pingzhong
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Li, Juncheng
Tang, Pingzhong
author_facet Li, Juncheng
Tang, Pingzhong
contents Linear Fisher market is one of the most fundamental economic models. The market is traditionally examined on the basis of individual's price-taking behavior. However, this assumption breaks in markets such as online advertising and e-commerce, where several oligopolists dominate the market and are able to compete with each other via strategic actions. Motivated by this, we study the price competition among sellers in linear Fisher markets. From an algorithmic game-theoretic perspective, we establish a model to analyze behaviors of buyers and sellers that are driven by utility-maximizing purposes and also constrained by computational tractability. The main economic observation is the role played by personalization: the classic benchmark market outcome, namely competitive equilibrium, remains to be a steady-state if every buyer must be treated "equally"; however, sellers have the incentive to personalize, and as a result the market would become more unpredictable and less efficient. In addition, we build a series of algorithmic and complexity results along the road to justify our modeling choices and reveal market structures. We find interesting connections between our model and other computational problems such as stable matching, network flow, etc. We believe these results and techniques are of independent interest.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2407_11869
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Price Competition in Linear Fisher Markets: Stability, Equilibrium and Personalization
Li, Juncheng
Tang, Pingzhong
Computer Science and Game Theory
Linear Fisher market is one of the most fundamental economic models. The market is traditionally examined on the basis of individual's price-taking behavior. However, this assumption breaks in markets such as online advertising and e-commerce, where several oligopolists dominate the market and are able to compete with each other via strategic actions. Motivated by this, we study the price competition among sellers in linear Fisher markets. From an algorithmic game-theoretic perspective, we establish a model to analyze behaviors of buyers and sellers that are driven by utility-maximizing purposes and also constrained by computational tractability. The main economic observation is the role played by personalization: the classic benchmark market outcome, namely competitive equilibrium, remains to be a steady-state if every buyer must be treated "equally"; however, sellers have the incentive to personalize, and as a result the market would become more unpredictable and less efficient. In addition, we build a series of algorithmic and complexity results along the road to justify our modeling choices and reveal market structures. We find interesting connections between our model and other computational problems such as stable matching, network flow, etc. We believe these results and techniques are of independent interest.
title Price Competition in Linear Fisher Markets: Stability, Equilibrium and Personalization
topic Computer Science and Game Theory
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.11869