Matching with Trade-offs: Revealed Preferences over Competiting Characteristics

We investigate in this paper the theory and econometrics of optimal matchings with competing criteria. The surplus from a marriage match, for instance, may depend both on the incomes and on the educations of the partners, as well as on characteristics that the analyst does not observe. The social optimum must therefore trade off matching on incomes and matching on educations. Given a exible specification of the surplus function, we characterize under mild assumptions the properties of the set of feasible matchings and of the socially optimal matching. Then we show how data on the covariation of the types of the partners in observed matches can be used to estimate the parameters that define social preferences over matches. We provide both nonparametric and parametric procedures that are very easy to use in applications.matching, marriage, assignment.

Cupid’s Invisible Hand: Social Surplus and Identification in Matching Models

We investigate a model of one-to-one matching with transferable utility when some of the characteristics of the players are unobservable to the analyst. We allow for a wide class of distributions of unobserved heterogeneity, subject only to a separability assumption that generalizes Choo and Siow (2006). We first show that the stable matching maximizes a social gain function that trades off exploiting complementarities in observable characteristic sand matching on unobserved characteristics. We use this result to derive simple closed-form formulæ that identify the joint surplus in every possible match and the equilibrium utilities of all participants, given any known distribution of unobserved heterogeneity. If transfers are observed, then the pre-transfer utilities of both partners are also identified. We discuss computational issues and provide an algorithm that is extremely efficient in important instances. Finally, we present two estimators of the joint surplus and we revisit Choo and Siow’s empirical application to illustrate the potential of our more general approach

Estimating Separable Matching Models

In this paper we propose two simple methods to estimate models of matching with transferable and separable utility introduced in Galichon and Salani\'e (2022). The first method is a minimum distance estimator that relies on the generalized entropy of matching. The second relies on a reformulation of the more special but popular Choo and Siow (2006) model; it uses generalized linear models (GLMs) with two-way fixed effects.Comment: 22 pages, 2 figure

The Roommate Problem - Is More Stable Than You Think

Stable matchings may fail to exist in the roommate matching problem, both when utility is transferable and when it is not. We show that when utility is transferable, the existence of a stable matching is restored when there is an even number of individuals of indistinguishable characteristics and tastes (types). As a consequence, when the number of individuals of any given type is large enough there always exist "quasi-stable" matchings: a stable matching can be restored with minimal policy intervention. Our results build on an analogy with an associated bipartite problem; it follows that the tools crafted in empirical studies of the marriage problem can easily be adapted to the roommate problem