We provide an illustration of how the design of labor market clearing mechanisms can affect incentives for human capital acquisition. Specifically, we extend the labor market matching model (with discrete transfers) of Kelso and Crawford (1982) to incorporate the possibility that agents may...

We develop a quality competition model to understand how price controls affect market outcomes in buyer-seller markets with discrete goods of varying quality. While competitive equilibria do not necessarily exist in such markets when price controls are imposed, we show that stable outcomes do...

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...

We develop a model of matching with contracts which incorporates, as special cases, the college admissions problem, the Kelso-Crawford labor market matching model, and ascending package auctions. We introduce a new "law of aggregate demand" for the case of discrete heterogeneous workers and show...

Holdout problems prevent private (voluntary and self-financing) assembly of complementary goods--such as land or dispersed spectrum--from many self-interested sellers. While mechanisms that fully respect sellers' property rights cannot alleviate these holdout problems, traditional solutions,...