Go to main navigation Navigation menu Skip navigation Home page Search

Seminar in Economics | with Olivier Bochet

Department of Economics welcomes you to a seminar with The seminar speaker is Olivier Bochet, NYU

Welcome to this seminar in economics organized by the Department of Economics, SSE. The seminar speaker is Olivier Bochet, NYU who will present "Perceived Competition".

Abstract

In contrast to standard economic models, recent empirical evidence suggests that agents often operate based on subjective and divergent views of the competitive landscape. We develop a novel framework in which such imperfections are explicitly modeled through subjective perception networks, and introduce the concept of perception-consistent equilibrium (PCE), in which agents’ actions and conjectures respond to the feedback generated by perceived competition. We establish the existence of equilibrium in broad classes of aggregative games. The model typically yields multiple equilibria, including outcomes that feature patterns of localized exclusion. Remarkably, heterogeneity in beliefs induces perceived competition rents—payoff differentials that arise purely from subjective misperceptions. We further show that PCE actions correspond to ordinal centrality measures, with eigenvector centrality emerging as a behavioral benchmark in separable payoff environments. Finally, a graph-theoretic taxonomy of PCEs reveals a hierarchical structure that ranks perceived competition rents. We also give conditions under which a unique stable equilibrium exists.

The seminar takes place at the Stockholm School of Economics, Bertil Ohlins gata 4. Room A550

Please contact kathrine.abelson@hhs.se if you have any questions.

Dept. of Economics Economics Seminar in economics