42,202 research outputs found
Spatial Aspects of Job Creation: Evidence from Western Germany
This paper provides detailed information about spatial interactions in the job creation process in West German regional labor markets. We investigate spatial (auto-) correlations in the matching process of vacancies and unemployed, examine regional hiring patterns, and identify clusters of regions with intense inter-regional matching. An extensive specification analysis illustrates the extent of regional dependencies. We investigate the impact of German re-unification on regional patterns of job creation, and compare regional matching efficiencies using a stochastic frontier approach.internal migration, regional unemployment, stochastic frontiers
International business cycles, financial markets and household production
This paper investigates the properties of an international real business cycle model with household production. We show that a model with disturbances to both market and household technologies reproduces the main regularities of the data and improves existing models in matching international consumption, investment and output correlations without irrealistic assumptions on the structure of international financial markets. Sensitivity analysis shows the robustness of the results to alternative specifications of the stochastic processes for the disturbances and to variations of unmeasured parameters within a reasonable range.Household production, international business cycles, taste shocks, consumption correlations
To Infinity and Beyond: Scaling Economic Theories via Logical Compactness
Many economic-theoretic models incorporate finiteness assumptions that, while
introduced for simplicity, play a real role in the analysis. Such assumptions
introduce a conceptual problem, as results that rely on finiteness are often
implicitly nonrobust; for example, they may depend upon edge effects or
artificial boundary conditions. Here, we present a unified method that enables
us to remove finiteness assumptions, such as those on market sizes, time
horizons, and datasets. We then apply our approach to a variety of matching,
exchange economy, and revealed preference settings.
The key to our approach is Logical Compactness, a core result from
Propositional Logic. Building on Logical Compactness, in a matching setting, we
reprove large-market existence results implied by Fleiner's analysis, and
(newly) prove both the strategy-proofness of the man-optimal stable mechanism
in infinite markets and an infinite-market version of Nguyen and Vohra's
existence result for near-feasible stable matchings with couples. In a
trading-network setting, we prove that the Hatfield et al. result on existence
of Walrasian equilibria extends to infinite markets. In a dynamic matching
setting, we prove that Pereyra's existence result for dynamic two-sided
matching markets extends to a doubly infinite time horizon. Finally, beyond
existence and characterization of solutions, in a revealed-preference setting
we reprove Reny's infinite-data version of Afriat's theorem and (newly) prove
an infinite-data version of McFadden and Richter's characterization of
rationalizable stochastic datasets
The Theory of Assortative Matching Based on Costly Signals
We study two-sided markets with a finite numbers of agents on each side, and with two-sided incomplete information. Agents are matched assortatively on the basis of costly signals. A main goal is to identify conditions under which the potential increase in expected output due to assortative matching (relative to random matching) is completely offset by the costs of signalling. We also study how the signalling activity and welfare on each side of the market change when we vary the number of agents and the distribution of their attributes, thereby displaying effects that are particular to small markets. Finally, we look at the continuous version of our two-sided market model and establish the connections to the finite version. Technically, the paper is based on the very elegant theory about stochastic ordering of (normalized) spacings and other linear combinations of order statistics from distributions with monotone failure rates, pioneered by R. Barlow and F. Proschan (1966, 1975) in the framework of reliability theory
Dynamic Matching Market Design
We introduce a simple benchmark model of dynamic matching in networked
markets, where agents arrive and depart stochastically and the network of
acceptable transactions among agents forms a random graph. We analyze our model
from three perspectives: waiting, optimization, and information. The main
insight of our analysis is that waiting to thicken the market can be
substantially more important than increasing the speed of transactions, and
this is quite robust to the presence of waiting costs. From an optimization
perspective, naive local algorithms, that choose the right time to match agents
but do not exploit global network structure, can perform very close to optimal
algorithms. From an information perspective, algorithms that employ even
partial information on agents' departure times perform substantially better
than those that lack such information. To elicit agents' departure times, we
design an incentive-compatible continuous-time dynamic mechanism without
transfers
Stochastic Stability for Roommate Markets
We show that for any roommate market the set of stochastically stable matchings coincideswith the set of absorbing matchings. This implies that whenever the core is non-empty (e.g.,for marriage markets), a matching is in the core if and only if it is stochastically stable, i.e., stochastic stability is a characteristic of the core. Several solution concepts have beenproposed to extend the core to all roommate markets (including those with an empty core).An important implication of our results is that the set of absorbing matchings is the onlysolution concept that is core consistent and shares the stochastic stability characteristic withthe core.Economics (Jel: A)
Allocation Problems in Ride-Sharing Platforms: Online Matching with Offline Reusable Resources
Bipartite matching markets pair agents on one side of a market with agents,
items, or contracts on the opposing side. Prior work addresses online bipartite
matching markets, where agents arrive over time and are dynamically matched to
a known set of disposable resources. In this paper, we propose a new model,
Online Matching with (offline) Reusable Resources under Known Adversarial
Distributions (OM-RR-KAD), in which resources on the offline side are reusable
instead of disposable; that is, once matched, resources become available again
at some point in the future. We show that our model is tractable by presenting
an LP-based adaptive algorithm that achieves an online competitive ratio of 1/2
- eps for any given eps greater than 0. We also show that no non-adaptive
algorithm can achieve a ratio of 1/2 + o(1) based on the same benchmark LP.
Through a data-driven analysis on a massive openly-available dataset, we show
our model is robust enough to capture the application of taxi dispatching
services and ride-sharing systems. We also present heuristics that perform well
in practice.Comment: To appear in AAAI 201
Almost Optimal Stochastic Weighted Matching With Few Queries
We consider the {\em stochastic matching} problem. An edge-weighted general
(i.e., not necessarily bipartite) graph is given in the input, where
each edge in is {\em realized} independently with probability ; the
realization is initially unknown, however, we are able to {\em query} the edges
to determine whether they are realized. The goal is to query only a small
number of edges to find a {\em realized matching} that is sufficiently close to
the maximum matching among all realized edges. This problem has received a
considerable attention during the past decade due to its numerous real-world
applications in kidney-exchange, matchmaking services, online labor markets,
and advertisements.
Our main result is an {\em adaptive} algorithm that for any arbitrarily small
, finds a -approximation in expectation, by
querying only edges per vertex. We further show that our approach leads
to a -approximate {\em non-adaptive} algorithm that also
queries only edges per vertex. Prior to our work, no nontrivial
approximation was known for weighted graphs using a constant per-vertex budget.
The state-of-the-art adaptive (resp. non-adaptive) algorithm of Maehara and
Yamaguchi [SODA 2018] achieves a -approximation (resp.
-approximation) by querying up to edges per
vertex where denotes the maximum integer edge-weight. Our result is a
substantial improvement over this bound and has an appealing message: No matter
what the structure of the input graph is, one can get arbitrarily close to the
optimum solution by querying only a constant number of edges per vertex.
To obtain our results, we introduce novel properties of a generalization of
{\em augmenting paths} to weighted matchings that may be of independent
interest
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