Matching with Contracts: An Efficient Marriage Market?

This paper studies a marriage market with two-sided information asymmetry in whichthe gains from marriage are stochastic. Contracts specify divisions of ex-post realizedmarital surplus. I first study a game in which one side of the matching market offerscontracts. I show that when expected marital surplus is strictly monotonic in agents’types, no separating equilibrium that achieves matching efficiency exists. I then studya social planner’s problem, finding necessary and sufficient conditions for a truthful directrevelation mechanism to achieve matching efficiency. These conditions become morestringent as the number of agents in the matching market increases.