Pricing and Investments in Matching Markets
Abstract
Different markets are cleared by different types of prices -- seller-specific prices that are uniform across buyers in some markets, and personalized prices tailored to the buyer in others. We examine a setting in which buyers and sellers make investments before matching in a competitive market. We introduce the notion of premuneration values -- the values to the transacting agents prior to any transfers -- created by a buyer-seller match. Personalized price equilibrium outcomes are independent of premuneration values and exhibit inefficiencies only in the event of "coordination failures," while uniform-price equilibria depend on premuneration values and in general feature inefficient investments even without coordination failures. There is thus a trade-off between the costs of personalizing prices and the inefficient investments under uniform prices. We characterize the premuneration values under which uniform-price equilibria similarly exhibit inefficiencies only in the event of coordination failures.Download Info
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Paper provided by Cowles Foundation for Research in Economics, Yale University in its series Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers with number 1810.Length: 68 pages
Date of creation: Jul 2011
Date of revision:
Handle: RePEc:cwl:cwldpp:1810
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Related research
Keywords: Directed search; Matching; Premuneration value; Prematch investments; Search;Other versions of this item:
- Mailath, George J. & Samuelson, Larry & Postlewaite, Andrew, 0. "Pricing and investments in matching markets," Theoretical Economics, Econometric Society.
- George J. Mailath & Andrew Postlewaite & Larry Samuelson, 2011. "Pricing and Investments in Matching Markets," Levine's Working Paper Archive 786969000000000162, David K. Levine.
- C78 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Game Theory and Bargaining Theory - - - Bargaining Theory; Matching Theory
- D40 - Microeconomics - - Market Structure and Pricing - - - General
- D41 - Microeconomics - - Market Structure and Pricing - - - Perfect Competition
- D50 - Microeconomics - - General Equilibrium and Disequilibrium - - - General
- D83 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Search, Learning, and Information
This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:
- NEP-ALL-2011-08-02 (All new papers)
- NEP-GTH-2011-08-02 (Game Theory)
- NEP-MIC-2011-08-02 (Microeconomics)
References
References listed on IDEASPlease report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
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Citations
Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.Cited by:
- George Mailath & Andrew Postlewaite & Larry Samuelson, 2012. "Premuneration Values and Investments in Matching Markets," PIER Working Paper Archive 12-008, Penn Institute for Economic Research, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania.
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