报告内容摘要

We consider Cournot competition in the presence of congestion effects. Our model consists of several service providers with differentiated services, competing for users who are sensitive to both prices and congestion. We distinguish two types of congestion effects, depending on whether spillover costs exist, that is, one service provider's congestion cost increases with other providers' output level. We quantify the efficiency of an unregulated oligopoly with respect to the optimal social welfare with tight upper and lower bounds. We show that when there is no spillover, the welfare loss in an unregulated oligopoly is limited to 25% of the social optimum, even in the presence of highly convex costs. On the other hand, when spillover cost is present, there does not exists a constant lower bound on the efficiency of an unregulated oligopoly, even with affine cost. We show that the efficiency depends on the relative magnitude between the marginal spillover cost and the marginal benefit to consumers. The paper is a joint work with Georgia Perakis, from MIT Sloan School of Management.

报告人简介

Dr. Wei Sun is a Research Staff Member at the Business Solutions and Mathematical Sciences division of the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York.  Wei is also a research affiliate with Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), from where she received a Ph.D in Operations Research in 2012 and an M.S degree in Computation Design and Optimization in 2006. Her current research focuses on the design, analysis and operations of services related infrastructures (e.g., communication and transportation systems) and data-driven pricing analytics for enterprise networks (e.g., fast-fashion retail business and healthcare organizations).

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