ICES: Small: Collaborative Research: Understanding the Roles of Intermediaries in Matching Markets

市场设计--经济工程--成功地重新设计了现实世界中的“双边匹配市场”，包括医生与住院医生的匹配和学生到学校的分配。最近越来越多的文献表明，双边匹配理论的方法和结果扩展到更一般的环境，包括代理人就合同进行谈判的“交易网络”。与双边匹配市场不同，交易网络的特征是中间人，即在市场上买卖的代理人。这些中间商可能是中间生产者(与供应链的大多数经济模式一样)，也可能只是促进贸易(例如，通过提供信息)。虽然中介的存在是网络匹配模型和以前的双边框架的明显区别，但在这些匹配模型中对中介的分析一直是有限的，这一研究将加深我们对市场中介行为和影响的理解。使用网络匹配框架的理论工作将辅之以使用生产网络的工厂级微观数据的详细经验分析，以深入了解中介机构对福利的影响程度。当理论没有提供准确的预测时，将开发模拟的反事实模型。这项工作将为市场设计方法在现实世界中介匹配市场中的新应用提供信息和支持。其中一个重点是了解“局部”扰动(例如，中介入口和出口)如何影响网络的“全球”结构；另一个重点是中介机构寻租的识别和减少。除了使应用市场设计中的新工作成为可能外，这项研究还将促进计算机科学家和从事市场设计理论和实践工作的经济学家之间的合作。

Market design--economic engineering--has been successful in the redesign of real-world "two-sided matching markets," including the matching of doctors to residencies and the assignment of students to schools. A recent and growing literature has shown that the methods and results of two-sided matching theory extend to substantially more general settings, including "trading networks" in which agents negotiate over contracts.Unlike two-sided matching markets, trading networks feature intermediaries, agents who both buy and sell in the market. These intermediaries may be intermediate producers (as in most economic models of supply chains) or may simply facilitate trade (e.g., through provision of information). Although the presence of intermediaries is the defining distinction between the matching-in-networks model and the previous two-sided frameworks, the analysis of intermediaries in these matching models has been limited.This research will further our understanding of the behavior and impact of market intermediaries. Theoretical work using the matching-in-networks framework will be supplemented with detailed empirical analyses using plant-level microdata on production networks, in order to gain insight into the magnitudes of intermediaries' effects on welfare. Simulated counterfactual models will be developed when theory does not provide sharp predictions.This work will inform and support new applications of market design approaches to real-world intermediated matching markets. One focus will be understanding how "local" perturbations (e.g., intermediary entrance and exit) affect the "global" structure of networks; another will be the identification and reduction of rent seeking by intermediaries.In addition to enabling novel work in applied market design, this research will promote joint work between computer scientists and economists working in the theory and practice of market design.