APL (Ajiken Power Lunch)

APL (Ajiken Power Lunch) is a lunchtime workshop open to public, including IDE staffs, visiting research fellows, IDEAS students, outside researchers and graduate students. This workshop provides a platform for presentation of any work in progress where we can discuss in either English or Japanese.

Those who would attend a seminar are asked to announce yourself to receptionists on your arrival at the IDE and to obtain APL Organizers' signature on your admission card after the seminar.

May 26, 2016. (Thursday) 14：00-15：30

Institute of Developing Economies, Japan External Trade Organization C21 Meeting Room 　

Price Competition in Product Variety Networks

We develop a product-differentiated model where the product space is a network defined as a set of varieties (nodes) linked by their degrees of substituability (edges). We also locate consumers into this network, so that the location of each consumer (node) corresponds to her “ideal” variety. We show that, even though prices need not to be strategic complements, there exists a unique Nash equilibrium in the price game among firms. Equilibrium prices are determined by both firms’ weighted Bonacich centralities and the average willingness to pay across consumers. They both hinge on the network structure of the firm-product space. We also investigate how local product differentiation and the spatial discount factor affect the equilibrium prices. We show that these effects non-trivially depend on the network structure. In particular, we find that, in a star-shaped network, the firm located in the star node does not always enjoy higher monopoly power than the peripheral firms.
(Coauther is Professor Yves Zenou in Monash University, Melbourne, Australia.)

Philip Ushchev (Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russia)

Toshitaka GOKAN

English