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RSRG Seminar

Thursday, October 10, 2013
12:00pm to 1:00pm
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Annenberg 107
Bertrand Networks
Moshe Babaioff, Microsoft Research, Silicon Valley,

Joint work with Brendan Lucier and Noam Nisan.

We study scenarios where multiple sellers of a homogeneous good compete on prices, where each seller can only sell to some subset of the buyers. Crucially, sellers cannot price-discriminate between buyers.  We model the structure of the competition by a graph (or hyper-graph), with nodes representing the sellers and edges representing populations of buyers. We study equilibria in the game between the sellers, prove that they always exist, and present various structural, quantitative, and computational results about them.  We also analyze the equilibria completely for a few cases.  Many questions are left open.

This paper appeared at ACM EC 2013, and it can be found at http://arxiv.org/abs/1304.6806.
A blog post about the paper can be found at http://windowsontheory.org/2013/06/13/prices-competition-and-captivity/.

For more information, please contact Sydney Garstang by phone at x4555 or by email at [email protected].