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

市场设计——经济工程——在重新设计现实世界的“双边匹配市场”方面取得了成功，包括医生与住院医生的匹配以及学生与学校的分配。最近越来越多的文献表明，双边匹配理论的方法和结果可以扩展到更一般的环境中，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，交易网络的特点是中介，即在市场上买卖的代理人。这些中间商可能是中间生产者（如在大多数供应链经济模式中），也可能只是促进贸易（如通过提供信息）。虽然中介机构的存在是网络匹配模型与之前的双边框架之间的决定性区别，但对这些匹配模型中的中介机构的分析是有限的。本研究将进一步加深我们对市场中介机构行为及其影响的理解。使用网络匹配框架的理论工作将辅以使用生产网络上的工厂级微观数据的详细实证分析，以便深入了解中介对福利的影响程度。当理论不能提供准确的预测时，模拟的反事实模型将被开发出来。这项工作将为市场设计方法在现实世界的中介匹配市场中的新应用提供信息和支持。一个重点将是理解“局部”扰动（例如，中介入口和出口）如何影响网络的“全球”结构；另一个将是识别和减少中介机构的寻租行为。除了在应用市场设计方面开展新颖的工作外，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的经济学家之间的联合工作。

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.