Endogenous liquidity risk and dealer market structure

This paper derives a liquidity cost process in a non-cooperative cost competition game among market makers and discusses its implication for the structure of a dealer market. The main result shows that there does not exist an equilibrium supporting both multiple market makers earning strictly positive profits and a well-behaved liquidity cost process (i.e. strictly increasing and convex) as documented in the price impact literature. Bertrand price competition arises as an equilibrium phenomenon, which naturally leads to the dominance of a cost-efficient market maker in the dealer market.