IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/gamebe/v67y2009i1p36-50.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Trading networks with price-setting agents

Author

Listed:
  • Blume, Lawrence E.
  • Easley, David
  • Kleinberg, Jon
  • Tardos, Éva

Abstract

In a wide range of markets, individual buyers and sellers trade through intermediaries, who determine prices via strategic considerations. Typically, not all buyers and sellers have access to the same intermediaries, and they trade at correspondingly different prices that reflect their relative amounts of power in the market. We model this phenomenon using a game in which buyers, sellers, and traders engage in trade on a graph that represents the access each buyer and seller has to the traders. We show that the resulting game always has a subgame perfect Nash equilibrium, and that all equilibria lead to an efficient allocation of goods. Finally, we analyze trader profits in terms of the graph structure -- roughly, a trader can command a positive profit if and only if it has an "essential" connection in the network, thus providing a graph-theoretic basis for quantifying the amount of competition among traders.

Suggested Citation

  • Blume, Lawrence E. & Easley, David & Kleinberg, Jon & Tardos, Éva, 2009. "Trading networks with price-setting agents," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 67(1), pages 36-50, September.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:gamebe:v:67:y:2009:i:1:p:36-50
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0899-8256(08)00218-2
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Crawford, Vincent P & Knoer, Elsie Marie, 1981. "Job Matching with Heterogeneous Firms and Workers," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 49(2), pages 437-450, March.
    2. Yavas, Abdullah, 1994. "Middlemen in Bilateral Search Markets," Journal of Labor Economics, University of Chicago Press, vol. 12(3), pages 406-429, July.
    3. Myerson, Roger B. & Satterthwaite, Mark A., 1983. "Efficient mechanisms for bilateral trading," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 29(2), pages 265-281, April.
    4. Bikhchandani, Sushil & Ostroy, Joseph M., 2002. "The Package Assignment Model," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 107(2), pages 377-406, December.
    5. Christian Hellwig, 2000. "Money, Intermediaries and Cash-in-Advance Constraints," Econometric Society World Congress 2000 Contributed Papers 1631, Econometric Society.
    6. Demange, Gabrielle & Gale, David & Sotomayor, Marilda, 1986. "Multi-Item Auctions," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 94(4), pages 863-872, August.
    7. Hall, George & Rust, John, 2000. "An empirical model of inventory investment by durable commodity intermediaries," Carnegie-Rochester Conference Series on Public Policy, Elsevier, vol. 52(1), pages 171-214, June.
    8. Babaioff, Moshe & Nisan, Noam & Pavlov, Elan, 2009. "Mechanisms for a spatially distributed market," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 66(2), pages 660-684, July.
    9. Kelso, Alexander S, Jr & Crawford, Vincent P, 1982. "Job Matching, Coalition Formation, and Gross Substitutes," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 50(6), pages 1483-1504, November.
    10. Leon Yang Chu & Zuo-Jun Max Shen, 2006. "Agent Competition Double-Auction Mechanism," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 52(8), pages 1215-1222, August.
    11. Fafchamps, Marcel & Gabre-Madhin, Eleni Z., 2006. "Agricultural markets in Benin and Malawi," African Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics, African Association of Agricultural Economists, vol. 1(1), pages 1-28, November.
    12. Leonard, Herman B, 1983. "Elicitation of Honest Preferences for the Assignment of Individuals to Positions," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 91(3), pages 461-479, June.
    13. Li, Yiting, 1998. "Middlemen and private information," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 42(1), pages 131-159, June.
    14. Douglas M. Gale & Shachar Kariv, 2007. "Financial Networks," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 97(2), pages 99-103, May.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Demange, Gabrielle, 2009. "The strategy structure of some coalition formation games," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 65(1), pages 83-104, January.
    2. Laurent Lamy, 2009. "Ascending auctions: some impossibility results and their resolutions with final price discounts," PSE Working Papers halshs-00575076, HAL.
    3. Mishra, Debasis & Parkes, David C., 2007. "Ascending price Vickrey auctions for general valuations," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 132(1), pages 335-366, January.
    4. Bikhchandani, Sushil & Ostroy, Joseph M., 2002. "The Package Assignment Model," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 107(2), pages 377-406, December.
    5. Bikhchandani, Sushil & Ostroy, Joseph M., 2006. "Ascending price Vickrey auctions," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 55(2), pages 215-241, May.
    6. Gerard van der Laan & Zaifu Yang, 2016. "An ascending multi-item auction with financially constrained bidders," The Journal of Mechanism and Institution Design, Society for the Promotion of Mechanism and Institution Design, University of York, vol. 1(1), pages 109-149, December.
    7. Zhiling Guo & Gary J. Koehler & Andrew B. Whinston, 2012. "A Computational Analysis of Bundle Trading Markets Design for Distributed Resource Allocation," Information Systems Research, INFORMS, vol. 23(3-part-1), pages 823-843, September.
    8. Mishra, Debasis & Talman, Dolf, 2010. "Characterization of the Walrasian equilibria of the assignment model," Journal of Mathematical Economics, Elsevier, vol. 46(1), pages 6-20, January.
    9. Benjamin Edelman & Michael Ostrovsky & Michael Schwarz, 2007. "Internet Advertising and the Generalized Second-Price Auction: Selling Billions of Dollars Worth of Keywords," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 97(1), pages 242-259, March.
    10. David Pérez-Castrillo & Marilda Sotomayor, 2017. "On the manipulability of competitive equilibrium rules in many-to-many buyer–seller markets," International Journal of Game Theory, Springer;Game Theory Society, vol. 46(4), pages 1137-1161, November.
    11. de Vries, Sven & Schummer, James & Vohra, Rakesh V., 2007. "On ascending Vickrey auctions for heterogeneous objects," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 132(1), pages 95-118, January.
    12. Zhou, Yu & Serizawa, Shigehiro, 2023. "Multi-object auction design beyond quasi-linearity: Leading examples," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 140(C), pages 210-228.
    13. Sotomayor, Marilda, 2007. "Connecting the cooperative and competitive structures of the multiple-partners assignment game," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 134(1), pages 155-174, May.
    14. Sotomayor, Marilda, 2005. "A Dynamic Market Clearing Price Mechanism with Multiple Demands," Brazilian Review of Econometrics, Sociedade Brasileira de Econometria - SBE, vol. 25(2), November.
    15. Wellman, Michael P. & Walsh, William E. & Wurman, Peter R. & MacKie-Mason, Jeffrey K., 2001. "Auction Protocols for Decentralized Scheduling," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 35(1-2), pages 271-303, April.
    16. Marilda Sotomayor, 2008. "Adjusting Prices in the Many-to-many Assignment Game," Working Papers 2008-13, Brown University, Department of Economics.
    17. Mishra, Debasis & Garg, Rahul, 2006. "Descending price multi-item auctions," Journal of Mathematical Economics, Elsevier, vol. 42(2), pages 161-179, April.
    18. Paul Schweinzer, 2008. "Labour market recruiting with intermediaries," Review of Economic Design, Springer;Society for Economic Design, vol. 12(2), pages 119-127, June.
    19. Schweinzer, Paul, 2006. "Labour market screening with intermediaries," Discussion Paper Series of SFB/TR 15 Governance and the Efficiency of Economic Systems 138, Free University of Berlin, Humboldt University of Berlin, University of Bonn, University of Mannheim, University of Munich.
    20. Laurent Lamy, 2009. "Ascending auctions: some impossibility results and their resolutions with final price discounts," Working Papers halshs-00575076, HAL.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Networks Trade Price formation;

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:gamebe:v:67:y:2009:i:1:p:36-50. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/inca/622836 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.