In a decentralized trading network, agents negotiate bilateral contracts. Prices emerge from local bargaining, not from a central auctioneer. The network has structure — not everyone can trade with everyone. Your position in the network determines your opportunities.
Hiller, Molnár, and Teytelboym (arXiv:2602.20868) prove a stark fairness result: agents with no essential role in the network always receive zero utility in every core allocation. Not “tend to receive less.” Not “are disadvantaged.” Zero. If the network can function without you — if removing you doesn't break any trade that couldn't be rerouted — you get nothing, regardless of your effort, your skill, or the value you add.
The result is stronger than it first appears. Even agents who ARE essential — whose removal would break trades — can receive zero utility across all core outcomes. Essentiality is necessary but not sufficient for receiving value. You must be essential AND positioned so that your essentiality cannot be competed away by alternative essential agents.
The mechanism is structural. The core of a cooperative game is the set of allocations that no coalition can improve upon. In a trading network, the core allocations systematically concentrate value at structural chokepoints — agents whose position cannot be replicated. Everyone else, no matter how productive, is replaceable, and replaceability means zero.
The general point: in decentralized systems where prices emerge from bilateral negotiation, fairness is not a design parameter. It is a consequence of network topology. The same trading rules that produce efficient outcomes — Nash equilibria supporting competitive equilibria, convergent price dynamics — simultaneously produce extreme inequality. Efficiency and fairness are not trade-offs in this setting. They are independent: the system achieves one without regard for the other.