Incentives for Strategic Behavior in Fisher Market Games

Abstract

In a Fisher market game, a market equilibrium is computed in terms of the utility functions and money endowments that agents reported. As a consequence, an individual buyer may misreport his private information to obtain a utility gain. We investigate the extent to which an agent's utility can be increased by unilateral strategic plays and prove that the percentage of this improvement is at most 2 for markets with weak gross substitute utilities. Equivalently, we show that truthfully reporting is a 0.5-approximate Nash equilibrium in this game. To identify sufficient conditions for truthfully reporting being close to Nash equilibrium, we conduct a parameterized study on strategic behaviors and further show that the ratio of utility gain decreases linearly as buyer's initial endowment increases or his maximum share of an item decreases. Finally, we consider collusive behavior of a coalition and prove that the utility gain is bounded by 1/(1 - maximum share of the collusion). Our findings justify the truthful reporting assumption in Fisher markets by a quantitative study on participants incentive, and imply that under large market assumption, the utility gain of a buyer from manipulations diminishes to 0.