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Existence and optimality of Cournot–Nash equilibria in a bilateral oligopoly with atoms and an atomless part

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Abstract

We consider a bilateral oligopoly version of the Shapley window model with large traders, represented as atoms, and small traders, represented by an atomless part. For this model, we provide a general existence proof of a Cournot–Nash equilibrium that allows one of the two commodities to be held only by atoms. Then, we show, using a corollary proved by Shitovitz (Econometrica 41:467–501, 1973), that a Cournot–Nash allocation is Pareto optimal if and only if it is a Walras allocation.

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Notes

  1. The symbol 0 denotes the origin of \(R^2_+\) as well as the real number zero: no confusion will result.

  2. \(\text{ card }(A)\) denotes the cardinality of a set A.

  3. In this paper, differentiability means continuous differentiability and is to be understood to include the case of infinite partial derivatives along the boundary of the consumption set (for a discussion of this case, see, for instance, Kreps (2012), p. 58).

  4. For a discussion of the properties of the correspondences introduced above and their proofs see, for instance, Debreu (1982), Sect. 4.

  5. In order to save in notation, with some abuse we denote by \(\mathbf{x}\) both the function \(\mathbf{x}(t)\) and the function \(\mathbf{x}(t,\mathbf{b}(t),p(\mathbf{b}))\).

  6. \(\Vert \cdot \Vert \) denotes the Euclidean norm and \(e^j\) denotes the vector whose \(j\hbox {th}\) coordinate is 1 and whose other coordinate vanishes.

  7. For a discussion of this literature, see Giraud (2003), p. 359 and p. 365.

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Correspondence to Giulio Codognato.

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We would like to thank two anonymous referees for their comments and suggestions. Francesca Busetto and Giulio Codognato gratefully acknowledge financial support from PRID2018-2-DIES005.

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Busetto, F., Codognato, G., Ghosal, S. et al. Existence and optimality of Cournot–Nash equilibria in a bilateral oligopoly with atoms and an atomless part. Int J Game Theory 49, 933–951 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00182-020-00719-z

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