Multi-Agent Based Simulation For The Price Dispersion In Online Markets

Price dispersion, defined as the distribution of prices of an item across sellers in one market, is the comprehensive reflection of the information flows state, the cost of transaction and pricing strategy of enterprise. It is also the wind vane of the market efficiency. Based on the understanding of the characteristics of network information transmission, people think e-commerce market has greater efficiency and lower friction than traditional offline trading market, can effectively reduce consumers'costs of transaction and searching information, lead to price dispersion convergence. However, with the development of e-commerce, empirical researches show that online market price dispersion doesn't weaken with the lower consumer information search cost, which contrary to the theoretical expectation.First, the paper summarizes the theoretical studies results of traditional market information search theory and empirical analysis conclusions of online market price dispersion, reflects the limitations of static equilibrium price dispersion interpretation based on traditional search theory. Then, the paper gives a theoretical analysis of online market price dispersion mechanism, builds a retailers competitive game model, consumers retailers game model and stochastic individual learning model based on the dynamics mechanism and learning rules of the evolutionary game. Finally, make simulation experiment using the simulation platform, export the evolutionary trends of market agent strategy adjustment and the market price dispersion, and analyze the impacts of market characteristics, retailer strategies and consumer behavior on the price dispersion.Simulation results show that:the market price tends to disperse, and ultimately to achieve stable equilibrium at a specific discrete level. The differentiation of retailer strategy is the root cause of the market price dispersion. The more retailers on the market, the lower the average market price level, but the higher the equilibrium price dispersion. The number of consumers had no significant impact on the market price dispersion. When there are differences in retailers'service and brands, the higher the consumers search efficiency, the larger the market price dispersion. The number of retailers has negative moderating effect for the impact consumers searching efficiency on the market price equilibrium.