Budgetary Effects on Pricing Equilibrium in Online Markets
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Following the work of Babaioff et al, we consider the pricing game with strategic vendors and a single buyer, modeling a scenario in which multiple competing vendors have very good knowledge of a buyer, as is common in online markets. We add to this model the realistic assumption that the buyer has a fixed budget and does not have unlimited funds. When the buyer's valuation function is additive, we are able to completely characterize the different possible pure Nash Equilibria (PNE) and in particular obtain a necessary and sufficient condition for uniqueness. Furthermore, we characterize the market clearing (or Walresian) equilibria for all submodular valuations. Surprisingly, for certain monotone submodular function valuations, we show that the pure NE can exhibit some counterintuitive phenomena; namely, there is a valuation such that the pricing will be market clearing and within budget if the buyer does not reveal the budget but will result in a smaller set of allocated items (and higher prices for items) if the buyer does reveal the budget. It is also the case that the conditions that guarantee market clearing in Babaioff et al for submodular functions are not necessarily market clearing when there is a budget. Furthermore, with respect to social welfare, while without budgets all equilibria are optimal (i.e. POA = POS = 1), we show that with budgets the worst equilibrium may only achieve 1/(n-2) of the best equilibrium.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".