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Markets are competitive if and only if P != NP

arxiv.org

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Re: Markets are competitive if and only if P != NP

#51
post #48
post #4

Very interesting. The author claims to have proved that markets can be informationally efficient or competitive, but not both. The implications for policy and regulation are significant. The author looks credible: https://philipmaymin.com/about-philip Thank you for sharing this on HN. -- To the mods: The title needs to be edited to replace the equal sign with not-equal.

The implications are not significant..? the real world is messy enough that this will not ever apply.

the abstract itself explains why there is a problem even if the real world is messy; markets are a social construct

Re: Markets are competitive if and only if P != NP

#53
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So markets can only be (perfectly) efficient or competitive, not both at the same time. Largely theoretical but it tracks common sense!

The title on this HN submission is just wrong. Click on the link and find out.

isn't that what they're saying with "not both at the same time"? the papers both have opposite signs, one has != and the other has =

Re: Markets are competitive if and only if P != NP

#54
post #9

If markets were perfectly efficient, entrepreneurship would not exist. An entrepreneur is, at this level, someone who looks for an arbitrage opportunity in correcting a market inefficiency, usually of the form "there is a market for X, X could be provided, but X is not currently provided."

That seems to stretch the meaning of market inefficiency. Is the lack of unlimited free energy an inefficiency in a market? Because an entrepreneur who achieves that is going to do pretty well. I’d say that would be creating value not optimizing market efficiency.

Yeah, and arbitrage. Arbitrage is exploiting the difference in prices of the same asset between two markets. Arbitrage is also risk-free or darn close to it. Entrepreneurship is anything but. Arbitrage is not "gee this product doesn't exist, I'll start a company and invent it and manufacture it and sell it" ...

Re: Markets are competitive if and only if P != NP

#55
post #2

The actual paper's title is "Markets are competitive if and only if P != NP" Seems that HN's auto-headline rewriting in this case has made a critical error :) >Artificial intelligence, by expanding firms' computational capabilities, is pushing markets from the competitive regime toward the collusive regime, explaining the empirical emergence of algorithmic collusion without explicit coordination. I have to dig more i…

The paper seems to be based on an invalid assumption. From the abstract:

> If P != NP, the collusion detection problem is computationally infeasible for markets satisfying a natural instance-hardness condition on their demand structure, rendering punishment threats non-credible and collusion unstable.

...and then from the paper:

> Stigler (1964) famously argued that the “chief difficulty” of collusion is detecting “secret price-cutting.”

The thing is that Stigler's insight is far from proven, and indeed, the primary difficulty in collusion is often not the detection of defection. Firms know they're being undercut all the time. The problem is that very often, there is nothing they can do about it. Markets are specifically structured as firm-to-firm transactions, where competing firms have no leverage over what your firm can do or what sort of transactions you can conduct, and as long as this condition holds it doesn't matter if you know that a competitor is fucking you over, you can't do anything about it.

I'd argue that the increase in collusion and anticompetitive behavior lately is because these conditions increasingly don't hold. When you intersperse another party in the transaction, eg. a regulatory agency, permitting body, or exclusive distribution deal, you introduce a leverage point for incumbents to punish competitors who choose to undercut them.

Re: Markets are competitive if and only if P != NP

#57
post #16

A 2010 entry by the same author: Markets are efficient if and only if P = NP https://arxiv.org/abs/1002.2284 :)

Assuming the original result is correct, isn’t the linked paper simply a corollary?

The newer paper expands on the work of the former.

Re: Markets are competitive if and only if P != NP

#58
post #9

If markets were perfectly efficient, entrepreneurship would not exist. An entrepreneur is, at this level, someone who looks for an arbitrage opportunity in correcting a market inefficiency, usually of the form "there is a market for X, X could be provided, but X is not currently provided."

Ok so the market is perfect... but I exist and have labor to provide. Am I not naturally an "inefficiency" by not participating in the market? Therefore by participating alone, I have a new wrinkle to work from?

Re: Markets are competitive if and only if P != NP

#60

Would anyone mind explaining what P and NP are?

P and NP are classes of computational problems.

A problem in P can be solved in polynomial time - the computation required grows relatively slowly as the input size increases. Like sorting a list of numbers.

A problem in NP requires exponential time or greater, but a proposed solution can be verified quickly. For example, checking a completed Sudoku puzzle.

It is believed but unproven that all problems in NP are NOT in P.

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