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.
Markets are competitive if and only if P != NP
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Re: Markets are competitive if and only if P != NP
#52Want to buy/sell a stock?
Humans need to manually submit in the system.
Re: Markets are competitive if and only if P != NP
#53Earlier 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.
Re: Markets are competitive if and only if P != NP
#54If 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.
Re: Markets are competitive if and only if P != NP
#55The 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…
> 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
#56Re: Markets are competitive if and only if P != NP
#57Re: Markets are competitive if and only if P != NP
#58If 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."
Re: Markets are competitive if and only if P != NP
#59It's time to forbid bots and HFT. Want to buy/sell a stock? Humans need to manually submit in the system.
Re: Markets are competitive if and only if P != NP
#60Would anyone mind explaining what P and NP are?
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.