Bidding strategies in the Swedish housing market

Abstract: This report focuses on an introduction of game theoretical models and how they can be applied in the Swedish housing market. Game theory is a study of mathematical models of human conflicts and cooperation between rational decision makers within a competitive situation. There are several different strategies that a player can use. In this thesis each strategy is assigned to one player. So how will the players behave in a game, and what strategy is the most successful? By using the software MatLab, the authors creates a game where the strategies assigned to each player gets randomly distributed budgets and are randomly selected to place bids during the game. The game is then played 1 000 000 times to see what strategy is the most successful. It is also tested to see what strategy is the most successful if the players have the same budgets. The authors conclude that in practice it is the size of the budget that determines who will win the bidding, hence there are minor differences between the different strategies in how much they pay on average to win.