# title
Mean Field Equilibria of Pricing Games in Internet Marketplaces

# abstract
We model an Internet marketplace using a set of servers that choose prices for performing jobs. Each server has a queue of unfinished jobs, and is penalized for delay by the market maker via a holding cost. A server completes jobs with a low or high "quality", and jobs truthfully report the quality with which they were completed. The best estimate of quality based on these reports is the "reputation" of the server. A server bases its pricing decision on the distribution of its competitors offered prices and reputations. An entering job is given a random sample of servers, and chooses the best one based on a linear combination of price and reputation. We seek to understand how prices would be determined in such a marketplace using the theory of Mean Field Games. We show the existence of a Mean Field Equilibrium and show how reputation plays a role in allowing servers to declare larger prices than their competitors. We illustrate our results by a numerical study of the system via simulation with parameters chosen from data gathered from existing Internet marketplaces.

# publicationOutlet
SIGMETRICS/PERFORMANCE 2016: PROCEEDINGS OF THE SIGMETRICS/PERFORMANCE JOINT INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON MEASUREMENT AND MODELING OF COMPUTER SCIENCE

# nameOfConference
Proceedings of the 2016 ACM SIGMETRICS International Conference on Measurement and Modeling of Computer Science

# publisher.label
Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)

# keywords[]
35 Commerce, Management, Tourism And Services

# authorList[]
Raja, V. R., Ramaswamy, V., Shakkottai, S., & Subramanian, V.

# editorList[]
Alouf, S., Jean-Marie, A., Hegde, N., & Proutière, A.