Furthermore, they instantly adjust their desired subscription vectors and to maximize their utility given the current set of prices and interest vectors. We assume that the brokers update their prices asynchronously. One plausible strategy is for a broker to set its price to the value that maximizes its profit, assuming all other prices remain fixed. Such an update strategy is guaranteed to produce the optimal profit up until the moment when the next broker updates its parameters. A useful construct for understanding the resulting dynamics is the profit landscape .
Profit is higher in dark regions.
The landscape shown in Fig. Here, its profit is completely independent of , and it can charge the monopolistic price derived previously. For these marginal customers, the only alternative is to subscribe to broker 1. In other words, broker 2's rejects constitute broker 1's market. If broker 1 is myoptimal, it can derive from its profit landscape a function that gives the value of that maximizes the profit when broker 2 charges price .