Can I read Non-price Equilibria in Markets of Discrete Goods on EtoBox?

Non-price Equilibria in Markets of Discrete Goods by Avinatan Hassidim; Haim Kaplan; Yishay Mansour; Noam Nisan is a scholarly article available to read on EtoBox.

What is Non-price Equilibria in Markets of Discrete Goods about?

The basic question that Economics deals with is how to "best" allocate scarce resources. The basic answer is that trade can improve everyone's welfare, and will lead to a market equilibrium: a vector of resource prices that "clear the market" and lead to an efficient allocation. Indeed, Arrow and Debreu and much further work show that such market equilibria exist in general settings.Or do they...? An underlying assumption for the existence of price-equilibria is always some notion of "convexity". However, markets of discrete items -arguably the main object of study in computerized markets and auctions -are only rarely "convex" and indeed in most cases do not have any price-based equilibria. What can we predict to happen in such markets? Will these outcomes be efficient in any sense? In this paper we approach these questions by viewing the market as a game, and studying its Nash-equilibria.We study a very basic model of a market where a single seller is selling m heterogeneous indivisible items to n buyers, where buyers may have arbitrary valuations over bun-

Author

Avinatan Hassidim; Haim Kaplan; Yishay Mansour; Noam Nisan

Publisher

ACM

Published

2011

Language

EN