Pricing Games in Networks

  • Eva Tardos | Cornell University

Network games play a fundamental role in understanding behaviour in many domains, ranging from communication networks through markets to social networks. In this talk we will study in which individual buyers and sellers trade through intermediaries. 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. In this model, traders set prices strategically, and then buyers and sellers react to the prices they are offered. We show that all equilibria lead to an efficient (i.e. socially optimal) allocation of goods, and study how the profits obtained by the traders depend on the underlying topology, thus providing a graph-theoretic basis for quantifying the amount of competition among traders. The talk is based on joint work with Larry Blume, David Easley, and Jon Kleinberg.

Speaker Details

Eva Tardos is a theoretical computer scientist specializing in design and analysis of algorithms for problems in networks and combinatorial optimization, including approximation algorithms, online algorithms, linear and integer programming, and algorithmic game theory. She is currently Chair of Computer Science at Cornell University. She is the recipient of the Fulkerson Prize (1988) and the George B. Danzig Prize (2006). She has also been an NSF Presidential Young Investigator, Sloan Fellow, Packard Fellow, and Guggenheim Fellow. She is also an ACM Fellow, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the National Academy of Engineering.

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