Matching in Centralized and Decentralized Labor Markets

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9507791 Roth This proposal is for parallel theoretical and empirical investigations into the matching processes which go on in centralized and decentralized labor markets. It builds on an investigation carried out with prior NSF support. The theoretical part of the investigation has so far focused on "two-sided matching" models. The empirical part of the investigation has so far included studies of the entry level labor markets for physicians in the US (including entry into specialties) and in Britain (where differently organized markets operate in each region of the National Health service), as well as entry level labor markets for lawyers (for associate positions in law partnerships and clerkships in Federal courts in ;the US, and for "articling" positions in Canada), dentists (particularly oral surgeons but also pediatric dentists and periodontists), clinical psychologists, and new graduates of elite Japanese universities. Matching processes which are not labor markets have also been studied, such as the (different) recruitment processes of American sororities and fraternities, and the market for post-season college football bowls. The most striking empirical discovery of the recent part of the investigation is that each of these markets has a period in its history which exhibited the phenomenon of unraveling of transaction times ("jumping the gun"), in which market transactions came earlier and earlier in response to competition, resulting in various types of market failure. The present institutional structure of each of these diverse markets, whose organizations range from almost completely decentralized to almost completely centralized, is in substantial part a response to this history. The past work concentrated on the analysis and comparison of entry level marketq which employ centralized market clearing mechanisms. The present investigation is intended to analyze decentralized labor markets, both entry level and senior level, and compare their operation and matching effectiv eness both with other decentralized markets and with centralized ones. The five broad lines of inquiry in the current project can be summarized as: Market clearing and the effective length of a decentralized market namely how long the market remains open, how long individual offers remain open, and how long it takes to make a new offer after a previous offer has been rejected; Decentralized markets as matching processes with random elements such as which firm reaches a given candidate first by telephone, when more than one is trying to do so; Improving existing markets and designing new ones in order to better understand how different market regulations work in combination with each other, and what incentives and disincentives they create singly and together in particular contexts such as computer assisted markets; Senior level labor markets namely highly decentralized markets in which firms and workers begin matched and matchings are destabilized by retirements and the creation of new positions; and Advice to individual market participants such as whether or not a student physician's self-interest is served by revealing her true preference order for hospitals.