Decentralized Multi-product Pricing: Diagonal Dominance, Nash Equilibrium, and Price of Anarchy

TL;DR

This paper analyzes how decentralized pricing decisions in multi-product firms can lead to efficiency losses, providing bounds on revenue ratios and conditions for equilibrium, based on demand interactions.

Contribution

It introduces a tight bound on the Price of Anarchy in multi-product pricing games, linking efficiency loss to demand interaction parameters and spectral properties.

Findings

Efficiency loss is bounded below by a function of cross-price effects.

Existence and uniqueness of Nash equilibrium are established under diagonal dominance.

A spectral analysis provides an exact characterization of efficiency loss.

Abstract

Decentralized decision making in multi--product firms can lead to efficiency losses when autonomous decision makers fail to internalize cross--product demand interactions. This paper quantifies the magnitude of such losses by analyzing the Price of Anarchy in a pricing game in which each decision maker independently sets prices to maximize its own product--level revenue. We model demand using a linear system that captures both substitution and complementarity effects across products. We first establish existence and uniqueness of a pure--strategy Nash equilibrium under economically standard diagonal dominance conditions. Our main contribution is the derivation of a tight worst--case lower bound on the ratio between decentralized revenue and the optimal centralized revenue. We show that this efficiency loss is governed by a single scalar parameter, denoted by $\mu$, which measures the aggregate strength of cross--price effects relative to own--price sensitivities. In particular, we prove that the revenue ratio is bounded below by $4(1-\mu)/(2-\mu)^2$, and we demonstrate the tightness of this bound by constructing a symmetric market topology in which the bound is exactly attained. We further refine the analysis by providing an instance--exact characterization of efficiency loss based on the spectral properties of the demand interaction matrix. Together, these results offer a quantitative framework for assessing the trade--off between centralized pricing and decentralized autonomy in multi--product firms.