Article history: Accepted 19 February 2012 JEL classification: C72 D01 D43 L13

We introduce a new measure of the discrepancy in strategic games between the social welfare in a Nash equilibrium and in a social optimum, that we call selfishness level. It is the smallest fraction of the social welfare that needs to be offered to each player to achieve that a social optimum is realized in a pure Nash equilibrium. The selfishness level is unrelated to the price of stability an...

Recent experiments suggest that games where actions are strategic substitutes rather than strategic complements exhibit some desirable performance characteristics. This paper reports an experiment conducted to test whether these characteristics extend to differentiated product Cournot and Bertrand markets. We find that Cournot markets do not generally outperform Bertrand markets, and that the o...

In many smart infrastructure applications, flexibility in achieving sustainability goals can be gained by engaging end users. However, these users often have heterogeneous preferences that are unknown to the decision maker tasked with improving operational efficiency. Modeling user interaction as a continuous game between noncooperative players, we propose a robust parametric utility learning f...

The Bertrand paradox question is: “Consider a unit-radius circle for which the length of a side of an inscribed equilateral triangle equals 3 . Determine the probability that the length of a ‘random’ chord of a unit-radius circle has length greater than 3 .” Bertrand derived three different ‘correct’ answers, the correctness depending on interpretation of the word, random. Here we employ geomet...

Incentives and Welfare Effect of Sharing Firm-Specific Information by Jim Y. Jin* This paper studies the incentives and the welfare effect of sharing firm-specific information in asymmetric Cournot and Bertrand oligopoly with mixed substitute and complement goods. Revealing firm-specific cost information is the dominant strategy in Cournot oligopoly, while concealing is so in Bertrand oligopoly...

In the study of power control and allocation based on pricing, the utility of secondary users is usually studied from the perspective of the signal to noise ratio. The study of secondary user utility from the perspective of communication demand can not only promote the secondary users to meet the maximum communication needs, but also to maximize the utilization of spectrum resources, however, r...

In this article, we report the results of a study that explores an output-pricing game model in a complex system which comprises two main manufacturers and two complementary product enterprises. First, optimization method is used to study the influence of parameters on the optimal decisions of the model. Second, a dynamic game model and a controlled model are established in order to analyse the...

Abstract: This paper studies a continuous Bertrand duopoly game model with two-stage delay. Our aim is to investigate the influence of delay and weight on the complex dynamic characteristics of the system. We obtain the bifurcation point of the system respect to delay parameter by calculating. In addition, the dynamic properties of the system are simulated by power spectrum, attractor, bifurcat...