Computational Methods for Oblivious Equilibrium

Authors:
Gabriel Y. Weintraub;C. Lanier Benkard;Benjamin Van Roy
Affiliations:
Business School, Columbia University, New York, New York 10027;Department of Economics, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut 06511;Stanford University, Stanford, California 94305
Venue:
Operations Research
Year:
2010

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Abstract

Oblivious equilibrium is a new solution concept for approximating Markov-perfect equilibrium in dynamic models of imperfect competition among heterogeneous firms. In this paper, we present algorithms for computing oblivious equilibrium and for bounding approximation error. We report results from computational case studies that serve to assess both efficiency of the algorithms and accuracy of oblivious equilibrium as an approximation to Markov-perfect equilibrium. We also extend the definition of oblivious equilibrium, originally proposed for models with only firm-specific idiosyncratic random shocks, and our algorithms to accommodate models with industry-wide aggregate shocks. Our results suggest that, by using oblivious equilibrium to approximate Markov-perfect equilibrium, it is possible to greatly increase the set of dynamic models of imperfect competition that can be analyzed computationally.