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Price Competition over Boundedly Rational Agents

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  • B. Luppi
Abstract
We develop a model to study market interaction between rational firms on one side of the market and boundedly rational consumers on the other. A special feature of bounded rationality is modelled here: from psychological evidence, people tend to group events or numbers into categories; therefore we consider consumers who partition the price space into connected sets and regard each price belonging to the same set as equal. According to Rubinstein (1993), we endogenize the choice of the price partition by consumers, who determine the optimal price partition given the constraint imposed on their ability to process information on prices. We develop a model with two firms and two states of nature. We show that we depart from classical Bertrand result when consumers are characterized by a bound on the finiteness of price partition inferior to the cardinality of the space of world states. In other words, in presence of consumers who can partition the price space into two sets and with two states of the world, firms find optimal to set price above marginal cost, making positive profits. The intuition of the result can be explained as follows: when a consumer chooses the price partition, she faces a trade off between the detection of the state of nature and the detection of a deviating behavior of the firm in a given state of nature.

Suggested Citation

  • B. Luppi, 2006. "Price Competition over Boundedly Rational Agents," Working Papers 565, Dipartimento Scienze Economiche, Universita' di Bologna.
    • Handle: RePEc:bol:bodewp:565
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    1. Michele Piccione & Ariel Rubinstein, 2003. "Modeling the Economic Interaction of Agents With Diverse Abilities to Recognize Equilibrium Patterns," Journal of the European Economic Association, MIT Press, vol. 1(1), pages 212-223, March.
    2. Rubinstein, Ariel, 1993. "On Price Recognition and Computational Complexity in a Monopolistic Model," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 101(3), pages 473-484, June.
    3. Stefano DellaVigna & Ulrike Malmendier, 2004. "Contract Design and Self-Control: Theory and Evidence," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 119(2), pages 353-402.
    4. Osborne, Martin J & Rubinstein, Ariel, 1998. "Games with Procedurally Rational Players," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 88(4), pages 834-847, September.
    5. Chaim Fershtman & Ehud Kalai, 1993. "Complexity Considerations and Market Behavior," RAND Journal of Economics, The RAND Corporation, vol. 24(2), pages 224-235, Summer.
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    Cited by:

    1. Oktay Sürücü, 2014. "Lying for the Greater Good: Bounded Rationality in a Team," The International Journal of Economic Behavior - IJEB, Faculty of Business and Administration, University of Bucharest, vol. 4(1), pages 151-163.
    2. repec:but:manage:v:4:y:2014:i:1:p:151-163 is not listed on IDEAS

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