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Seminar by Prof. Vijay Subramaniam

Title: Searching And Bargaining With Middlemen
Speaker: Prof. Vijay Subramaniam, Northwestern University.
Date and Time :  26th July, 2013, 2-30 - 3.30 PM
Venue: ME 217, Mechanical Engineering.

Abstract: We study decentralized markets which include middlemen, producers and consumers connected via a trading network. We develop a model for trade in such settings based on non-cooperative bargaining with search frictions. Our goal is to investigate how the structure of the trading network and the role of middlemen influence the market's efficiency and fairness. To this end, we introduce the concept of limit stationary equilibrium which characterizes the trading patterns that emerge in a general trading network with a large population of agents. We use this concept to analyze how competition among middlemen is influenced by the network structure, how endogenous delay emerges in trade and how surplus is shared between producers and consumers. This is joint work with Thanh Nguyen and Randy Berry at Northwestern University.

Speaker Bio: Vijay Subramaniam received the B.Tech. degree in Electronics Engineering from IIT Madras in 1993. Subsequently, he obtained M.Sc. (Engg.) degree in Electrical Communication Engineering from IISc Bangalore in 1995 and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He worked in the research arm of the Networks Business Sector of Motorola in Arlington Heights, Illinois, USA until May 2006. In May 2006, he moved to the Hamilton Institute of the National University of Ireland, Maynooth as a Research Fellow. During Summer 2010, he was a visiting reseacher at LIDS MIT. From Nov 2010 to Oct 2011, he was a Senior Research Associate in the EECS Department at Northwestern University. Currently, he is a Research Assistant Faculty in the EECS Department at Northwestern University.

 

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