COMPETITIVE PRICING IN SOCIALLY NETWORKED ECONOMIES

Abstract

In the context of a socially networked economy, this paper demonstrates an Edgeworth equivalence between the set of competitive allocations and the core. Each participant in the economy may have multiple links with other participants and the equilibrium network may be as large as the entire set of participants. A clique is a group of people who are all connected with each other. Large cliques, possibly as large as the entire population, are permitted ; this is important since we wish to include in our analysis large, world-wide organizations such as workers in multi-national firms and members of world-wide environmental organizations, for example, as well as small cliques, such as two person partnerships. A special case of our model is equivalent to a club economy where clubs may be large and individuals may belong to multiple clubs. The features of our model that cliques within a networked economy may be as large as the entire population and individuals may belong to multiple cliques thus allow us to extend the extant decentralisation literature on competitive pricing in economies with clubs and multiple memberships (where club sizes are uniformly bounded, independent of the size of the economy).social networks ; competitive pricing ; cliques ; clubs ; Edgeworth equivalence ; core