Equilibrium Dynamics in Market Games with Exchangeable and Divisible Resources

We study a market game with n ≥ 2 players competing over m ≥ 1 divisible resources of different finite capacities. Resources are traded via the proportional sharing mechanism, where players are price-anticipating, meaning that they can influence the prices with their bids. Additionally, each player has an initial endowment of the resources which are sold at market prices. Although the players’ total profit functions may be discontinuous in the bids, we prove existence and uniqueness of pure Nash equilibria of the resulting market game. Then, we study a discrete dynamic arising from repeatedly taking the (unique) equilibrium resource allocation as initial endowments for the next market game. We prove that the total utility value of the dynamic converges to either an optimal allocation value (maximizing total utility over the allocation space) or to a restricted optimal allocation value, where the restriction is defined by fixing some tight resources which are exclusively allocated to a single player. As a corollary, it follows that for strictly concave utility functions, the aggregated allocation vector of the dynamic converges to the unique (possibly restricted) optimal aggregated allocation, and for linear utility functions, we even get convergence of the dynamic to a (possibly restricted) optimal solution in the (non-aggregated) original allocation space.