On the Correspondence of Contracts to Salaries in (Many-to-Many) Matching

Scott Duke Kominers

Article | Games and Economic Behavior

On the Correspondence of Contracts to Salaries in (Many-to-Many) Matching

Abstract

In this note, I extend the work of Echenique (2012) to show that a model of many-to-many matching with contracts may be embedded into a model of many-to-many matching with wage bargaining whenever (1) all agentsʼ preferences are substitutable and (2) the matching with contracts model is unitary, in the sense that every contractual relationship between a given firm–worker pair is specified in a single contract. Conversely, I show that unitarity is essentially necessary for the embedding result.

Keywords: Many-to-Many Matching; stability; Substitutes; Contract Design; Unitarity; Market Design; Contracts; Marketplace Matching; Balance and Stability; Economics;

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Kominers, Scott Duke. "On the Correspondence of Contracts to Salaries in (Many-to-Many) Matching." Games and Economic Behavior 75, no. 2 (July 2012): 984–989.

This paper develops a class of equilibrium-independent predictions of competitive equilibrium with indivisibilities. Specifically, we prove an analogue of the “Lone Wolf Theorem” of classical matching theory, showing that when utility is perfectly transferable, any agent who does not participate in trade in one competitive equilibrium must receive her autarky payoff in every competitive equilibrium. Our results extend to approximate equilibria and to settings in which utility is only approximately transferable.

Hatfield and Kominers (2012) introduced a model of matching in networks with bilateral contracts and showed that stable outcomes exist in supply chains when firms' preferences over contracts are fully substitutable. Hatfield and Kominers (2012) also asserted that in their setting, full substitutability is equivalent to the assumption that all indirect utility representations of each firm's preferences are quasisubmodular; we show here that this claimed equivalence result does not hold in general. We show instead that full substitutability is equivalent to weak quasisubmodularity of all indirect utility representations.

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On the Correspondence of Contracts to Salaries in (Many-to-Many) Matching

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