Remarks on existence and uniqueness of Cournot-Nash equilibria in the non-potential case (Q475319)

The authors consider the following game model with a continuum of agents: For two compact metric spaces \(X\) an \(Y\), \(X\) is the space of the players' types distributed (along \(X\)) with a probability measure \(\mu\), and \(Y\) is the action space. Each agent has to choose an action from the space \(Y\), so as to minimize some cost \(C(x,y,\nu)\) determined by the three parameters \((x,y,\nu)\), where \(x\) is the agent's type, \(y\) is the action from \(Y\) chosen by him, and \(\nu\) is the distribution of the agents' actions on \(Y\) resulting from the other agents' behavior. For this model, the existence of a \textit{Cournot-Nash equilibrium} and some of its properties are studied in different cases. It is defined as a joint probability measure \(\gamma\) on \(X\times Y\) such that \(\mu\) is its marginal on \(X\), \(\nu\) is its marginal on \(Y\), and \[ \gamma(\{(x,y)\in X\times Y: C(x,y,\nu) = \min_{z\in Y} C(x,z,\nu)\})=1. \] The authors show how to use different methods (optimal transport, fixed point arguments, ordinary differential equations) to obtain the existence and/or uniqueness of the Cournot-Nash equilibrium in different cases of the cost function \(C(x,y,\nu)\). The paper also presents several numerical simulations to illustrate the applicability of their approach to compute this equilibrium.