On Trade in Bilateral Oligopolies with Altruistic and Spiteful Agents

TL;DR

This paper explores how altruism and spitefulness influence strategic trading behavior in bilateral oligopolies, revealing conditions under which agents prefer to abstain from trade due to their social preferences.

Contribution

It introduces a model incorporating altruistic and spiteful preferences in bilateral oligopolies and analyzes their impact on trade decisions and market outcomes.

Findings

Agents always find it advantageous to trade under altruism or spitefulness.

Altruistic agents concerned for opposite side promote trade, while same-side concerns discourage it.

Non-trade situations arise from violations of optimality conditions or non-concave payoffs.

Abstract

This paper studies the effects of altruism and spitefulness in a two-sided market in which agents behave strategically and trade according to the Shapley-Shubik mechanism. By assuming that altruistic agents have concerns for others on the opposite side of the market, it shows that agents always find advantageous to trade. However, they prefer to stay out of the market and consume their endowments when there are altruistic agents who have concerns for the welfare of those on the same side of the market, or when there are spiteful agents. These non-trade situations occur either because the necessary first-order conditions for optimality are violated or because agents' payoff functions are not concave.