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October 9, 2013: Dr. Moshe Babaioff, Microsoft Research Silicon Valley

We study scenarios where multiple sellers of a homogeneous good compete on prices, where each seller can only sell to some subset of the buyers. Crucially, sellers cannot price-discriminate between buyers. We model the structure of the competition by a graph (or hyper-graph), with nodes representing the sellers and edges representing populations of buyers. We study equilibria in the game between the sellers, prove that they always exist, and present various structural, quantitative, and computational results about them. We also analyze the equilibria completely for a few cases. Many questions are left open.

Moshe Babaioff is a Researcher at Microsoft Research, Silicon Valley (Mountain View, California). Prior to joining Microsoft Research at 2007, he spent two years as a post-doctoral scholar at the University of California, Berkeley. He received his PhD in Computer Science from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem at 2005, where he was advised by Professor Noam Nisan. He holds a M.Sc. in Computer Science and a B.A. in Mathematics and Computer Science, also from the Hebrew University. His research interests lie on the border of Computer Science Theory, Game Theory, and Microeconomic Theory. In particular, he is interested in the theoretical foundations of market design.

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