171 research outputs found

    Organisational niche boundaries in the n-space

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    The paper investigates organizational boundary spanning from the point of view of neighborhood relations. Neighborhood is defined with the closeness of organizations' resource utilization patterns. The key resource is the clientele's demand for organizational outputs (products, party programs, membership, etc.). Demand is characterized qualitatively by n taste descriptors that span an n-dimensional resource space. Organizational niche boundaries may take different forms and size. To avoid niche overlap over boundaries, organizations can configure in the resource space in different clusterings. Which are the densest arrangements that allow for the coexistence of maximal number of organizations? How can these coexisting neighborhoods build up? How do competition, new entry and the number of immediate neighbors change around the niche boundary with space dimension? The paper applies results of the sphere packing problem in n-dimensional geometry to answer these questions.

    Spatial competition with unit-demand functions

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    This paper studies a spatial competition game between two firms that sell a homogeneous good at some pre-determined fixed price. A population of consumers is spread out over the real line, and the two firms simultaneously choose location in this same space. When buying from one of the firms, consumers incur the fixed price plus some transportation costs, which are increasing with their distance to the firm. Under the assumption that each consumer is ready to buy one unit of the good whatever the locations of the firms, firms converge to the median location: there is minimal differentiation. In this article, we relax this assumption and assume that there is an upper limit to the distance a consumer is ready to cover to buy the good. We show that the game always has at least one Nash equilibrium in pure strategy. Under this more general assumption, the "minimal differentiation" principle no longer holds in general. At equilibrium, firms choose "minimal", "intermediate" or "full" differentiation, depending on this critical distance a consumer is ready to cover and on the shape of the distribution of consumers' locations

    Strategic Facility Location with Clients that Minimize Total Waiting Time

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    We study a non-cooperative two-sided facility location game in which facilities and clients behave strategically. This is in contrast to many other facility location games in which clients simply visit their closest facility. Facility agents select a location on a graph to open a facility to attract as much purchasing power as possible, while client agents choose which facilities to patronize by strategically distributing their purchasing power in order to minimize their total waiting time. Here, the waiting time of a facility depends on its received total purchasing power. We show that our client stage is an atomic splittable congestion game, which implies existence, uniqueness and efficient computation of a client equilibrium. Therefore, facility agents can efficiently predict client behavior and make strategic decisions accordingly. Despite that, we prove that subgame perfect equilibria do not exist in all instances of this game and that their existence is NP-hard to decide. On the positive side, we provide a simple and efficient algorithm to compute 3-approximate subgame perfect equilibria.Comment: To appear at the 37th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-23), full versio

    Equilibrium Analysis of Customer Attraction Games

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    We introduce a game model called "customer attraction game" to demonstrate the competition among online content providers. In this model, customers exhibit interest in various topics. Each content provider selects one topic and benefits from the attracted customers. We investigate both symmetric and asymmetric settings involving agents and customers. In the symmetric setting, the existence of pure Nash equilibrium (PNE) is guaranteed, but finding a PNE is PLS-complete. To address this, we propose a fully polynomial time approximation scheme to identify an approximate PNE. Moreover, the tight Price of Anarchy (PoA) is established. In the asymmetric setting, we show the nonexistence of PNE in certain instances and establish that determining its existence is NP-hard. Nevertheless, we prove the existence of an approximate PNE. Additionally, when agents select topics sequentially, we demonstrate that finding a subgame-perfect equilibrium is PSPACE-hard. Furthermore, we present the sequential PoA for the two-agent setting

    Aggregate uncertainty, framing effects, and candidate entry

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    This dissertation studies how different voter characteristics and electoral rules affect the incentives and decisions to seek political office. The focus is on generalizing standard approaches to observed differences in the runoff rule and incorporating more accurate descriptions of voter behavior which may not be fully rational. In each chapter, I consider a model of strategic entry by candidates for office in democratic elections. In the first chapter, I incorporate the observed differences in thresholds for first-round victory in a model of runoff elections. The set of equilibria varies substantially with the threshold, indicating that the 50 percent threshold used in most models is not innocuous. The set of equilibria immediately contains equilibria that were thought to exist only under plurality rule, whereas for thresholds above 50 percent, there is no change in the set of equilibria. Additionally, for any threshold under one half, there exist equilibria in which a candidate who loses with certainty still chooses to run. The set of two candidate equilibria is invariant to all thresholds under one third, and the set of multicandidate equilibria is invariant to all thresholds above one half. In the second chapter, I introduce aggregate uncertainty by making candidates unsure of the distribution of voter preferences in the electorate. The set of three candidate equilibria expands and equilibrium platforms become more diverse. This provides a theoretical basis for Duverger’s Hypothesis. Equilibria also feature two common empirical phenomena. For instance, some candidates choose to enter despite losing with certainty in equilibrium. Also, in some equilibria, a Condorcet winning candidate (a candidate who would win every pairwise election) fails to win the election. In the third chapter, I generalize the citizen-candidate model to a multidimensional setting and characterize the set of equilibria. I later incorporate two well-documented violations of the Weak Axiom of Revealed Preference in a model of plurality elections: the compromise and attraction effects. Entry by an extreme candidate may shift the frame of reference for some voters in ways which favor particular moderate candidates. Incorporating these preferences generate equilibria in which extremist candidates enter plurality elections in order to attractively frame their preferred moderate, even if the extremist has probability zero of obtaining office themselves
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