Coordination and Operation of Two-Sided Matching Markets: Theory and Evidence

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This project consists of two distinct but related lines of investigation. The first is a largely empirical investigation of the ways in which various entry level job markets for elite professionals are organized. The motivation for the investigation is provided by preliminary evidence that markets in which both workers and firms are highly heterogeneous may have some important features in common with one another, and may in general behave quite differently, and require different kinds of analysis, than markets involving fairly homogeneous firms and workers. Specifically, the project analyzes the American market for interns and residents, several parallel markets for beginning physicians which operate in the different regions of the National Health Service in the United Kingdom; the system by which French university professors obtain positions; the market for graduates of the University of Tokyo; and aspects of the markets for graduates of top American law and business schools. The second line of research is primarily theoretical, and consists of three parts. The first part explores why a variety of related two-sided matching models have similar properties, although they require different assumptions. The second part develops matching models with incomplete information that are more appropriate for real world problems. The third part consists of modelling and exploring the phenomena uncovered in the ongoing empirical investigations. This ambitious project should be supported because of the insights it will provide in the performance of such important labor markets as those for physicians, lawyers and business school graduates. The research will also improve matching theory. This is valuable because many different economic problems can be represented as matching problems.