Matching with Contracts: Comment
American Economic Review
vol. 98,
no. 3, June 2008
(pp. 1189-94)
Abstract
Hatfield and Milgrom (2005) present a unified model of matching with contracts phrased in terms of hospitals and doctors, which subsumes the standard two-sided matching and some package auction models. They show that a stable allocation exists if contracts are substitutes for each hospital. They further claim that if a hospital's preferences violate the substitutes condition, there exist singleton preferences for the other hospitals and doctors such that no stable allocation exists. We show this last claim does not hold in general. We further present a weaker condition that is necessary to guarantee the existence of stable allocations.Citation
Hatfield, John William, and Fuhito Kojima. 2008. "Matching with Contracts: Comment." American Economic Review, 98 (3): 1189-94. DOI: 10.1257/aer.98.3.1189Additional Materials
JEL Classification
- C78 Bargaining Theory; Matching Theory
- D86 Economics of Contract: Theory
- J41 Labor Contracts