Выступление аспиранта ИРГ Руслана Шавшина на научном семинаре Департамента теоретической экономики

На регулярном научном семинаре Департамента теоретической экономики 2 апреля Шавшин Руслан представил своё исследование об особенностях ценообразования на конечных рынках.

Тема: "Understanding Price Competition in Finite Markets With Limited Goods Public vs Private Consumer Valuations"  

 

Аннотация: We consider a finite two-sided market with the constrained number of products at every seller, who compete for potential buyers with one-unit demand. We analyze and compare two different frameworks: in the first one buyer’s valuations are publicly known and in the second one they are private information drawn from the given distribution. Both sellers and buyers are strategical.

In the case of the first setup previous studies discovered the effect of friction under the strategic directed search of buyers in a simplified version with one unit of homogeneous product per seller and common buyers valuations. We extend this assumption and propose the model with the arbitrary number of products per seller. We derive an analytical formula for the case of the equal number of products at every seller and deduce that the equilibrium price decreases with the growth of availability and drops to marginal costs when two sellers are able to serve the whole set of buyers. However, seller’s utility is a bell-shaped function of the number of products. This allows to estimate the influence of market concentration on the equilibrium markets characteristics. Then we consider the model with different capacities across sellers, formulate equilibrium conditions on prices, and clarify how the market power of a particular seller depends on its size.

The second setup is between the directed search theory and the theory of competing mechanisms. Though the model is symmetric, we prove that, in equilibrium, prices must be dispersed, i.e. a pure strategy equilibrium with the same prices is impossible. Uncertainty about buyers’ valuations inherently generates the expectation of heterogeneity among buyers which forces sellers to split the market and discriminate them in their willingness to pay.