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Does it make sense to analyse a two-sided market as a multi-choice game?

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Abstract

In this paper, we introduce the model of multi-choice two-sided market games related to two-sided market situations. Associated with them we study whether the disaggregate management of the individual units of goods provide better insights, by means of set valued solution concepts like the core that is widely used in classical and multi-choice two-sided games. We introduce the Owen core and the pairwise egalitarian contribution set in this context and analyse whether classic and multi-choice two-sided market models are equivalents in terms of these set valued solution concepts from the point of view of aggregate payoffs. The answer to this analysis is that in aggregate terms there are no significant differences between the multi-choice approach and the standard approach. However, they are not equivalent from a disaggregate perspective.

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Notes

  1. In Branzei et al. (2005), it is called deficient matrix.

  2. \(A\oplus B=\left\{ a+b \vert a\in A \text { , } b\in B \right\} \) and \(\lambda A =\left\{ \lambda a \vert a\in A \right\} \).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Alexandru Ioan Cuza University, Iasi, Romania

    R. Branzei

  2. Center of Operations Research (CIO), Department of Statistics, Mathematics and Computer Sciences, Miguel Hernández University of Elche, Avda de la Universidad s/n, 03202, Elche, Spain

    E. Gutiérrez, N. Llorca & J. Sánchez-Soriano

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  1. R. Branzei
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  2. E. Gutiérrez
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  3. N. Llorca
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  4. J. Sánchez-Soriano
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Correspondence to N. Llorca.

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First of all, the authors thank two anonymous referees and an Associated Editor for their helpful comments and suggestions to improve the contents of the paper. Financial support from the Government of Spain (Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad, MINECO) and the Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional (FEDER) under Project MTM2014-54199-P, and from the Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades (MCIU), the Agencia Estatal de Investigación (AEI) and the Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional (FEDER) under the Project PGC2018-097965-B-I00 are gratefully acknowledged.

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Branzei, R., Gutiérrez, E., Llorca, N. et al. Does it make sense to analyse a two-sided market as a multi-choice game?. Ann Oper Res 301, 17–40 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10479-020-03576-x

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