Related papers: Do Prices Coordinate Markets?
Collusion in market pricing is a concept associated with human actions to raise market prices through artificially limited supply. Recently, the idea of algorithmic collusion was put forward, where the human action in the pricing process is…
We introduce the theoretical study of a Platform Equilibrium in a market with unit-demand buyers and unit-supply sellers. Each seller can join a platform and transact with any buyer or remain off-platform and transact with a subset of…
Problem definition: Traditional monopoly pricing assumes sellers have full information about consumer valuations. We consider monopoly pricing under limited information, where a seller only knows the mean, variance and support of the…
The coordinated operation of interconnected but locally controlled electricity markets is generally referred to as a "coupling". In this paper we propose a new mechanism design for efficient coupling of independent electricity markets. The…
We study combinatorial auctions with bidders that exhibit endowment effect. In most of the previous work on cognitive biases in algorithmic game theory (e.g., [Kleinberg and Oren, EC'14] and its follow-ups) the focus was on analyzing the…
We develop a market model in which products generate state-dependent potential hidden charges. Firms differ in their ability to realize this potential. Unlike firms, consumers do not observe the state. They try to infer hidden charges from…
Motivated by recent progress on pricing in the AI literature, we study marketplaces that contain multiple vendors offering identical or similar products and unit-demand buyers with different valuations on these vendors. The objective of…
We consider the efficient outcome of a canonical economic market model involving buyers and sellers with independent and identically distributed random valuations and costs, respectively. When the number of buyers and sellers is large, we…
We consider the question of whether collusion among bidders (a "bidding ring") can be supported in equilibrium of unrepeated first-price auctions. Unlike previous work on the topic such as that by McAfee and McMillan [1992] and Marshall and…
To choose between two discrete goods, a consumer pays attention to only those with prices below a threshold. From these, she chooses her most preferred good. We assume consumers in a population have the same preference but may have…
When online sellers use AI learning algorithms to automatically compete on e-commerce platforms, there is concern that they will learn to coordinate on higher than competitive prices. However, this concern was primarily raised in…
The available liquidity at any time in financial markets falls largely short of the typical size of the orders that institutional investors would trade. In order to reduce the impact on prices due to the execution of large orders, traders…
In uniform-price markets, suppliers compete to supply a resource to consumers, resulting in a single market price determined by their competition. For sufficient flexibility, producers and consumers prefer to commit to a function as their…
Consider sellers in a competitive market that use algorithms to adapt their prices from data that they collect. In such a context it is plausible that algorithms could arrive at prices that are higher than the competitive prices and this…
We study the economic interactions among sellers and buyers in online markets. In such markets, buyers have limited information about the product quality, but can observe the sellers' reputations which depend on their past transaction…
In this paper, we show that if every consumer in an economy has a quasi-linear utility function, then the normalized equilibrium price is unique, and is locally stable with respect to the t\^atonnement process. Our study can be seen as that…
The prospect of collusive agreements being stabilized via the use of pricing algorithms is widely discussed by antitrust experts and economists. However, the literature is often lacking the perspective of computer scientists, and seems to…
Throttling is a popular method of budget management for online ad auctions in which the platform modulates the participation probability of an advertiser in order to smoothly spend her budget across many auctions. In this work, we…
Suppliers of differentiated goods make simultaneous pricing decisions, which are strategically linked. Because of market power, the equilibrium is inefficient. We study how a policymaker should target a budget-balanced tax-and-subsidy…
This paper examines whether widely used online learning algorithms in pricing can independently reach competitive outcomes or instead foster tacit collusion. This issue has drawn considerable attention from competition regulators as…