We develop an empirical methodology to study markets for services. These markets are typically organized as multi-attribute auctions in which buyers take into account seller's price as well as various characteristics, including quality. Our identification and estimation strategies exploit...

Taller workers receive a wage premium. Net of differences in family background, the disparity is similar in magnitude to the race and gender gaps. We exploit variation in an individual’s height over time to explore how height affects wages. Controlling for teen height essentially eliminates...

In this paper, I build a model marketplace populated by a finite number of sellers – each producing its own variety of the good – and a continuum of buyers–each searching for a variety he likes. Using the model, I study the response of a seller’s price to privately observed fluctuations...

We investigate under which conditions price competition in a market with matching frictions leads to sorting of buyers and sellers. Positive assortative matching obtains only if there is a high enough degree of complementarity between buyer and seller types. The relevant condition is...

We study market breakdown in a finance context under extreme adverse selection with and without competitive pricing. Adverse selection is extreme if for any price there are informed agent types with whom uninformed agents prefer not to trade. Market breakdown occurs when no trade is the only...

I develop a set-theoretic model of unawareness without making any structural assumptions on the underlying state space. Unawareness is characterized as a measurability constraint that results in players' reasoning about a “coarse" subjective algebra of events. The model is shown to be...

I construct a state space model with unawareness following Aumann (1976). Dekel, Lipman and Rustichini (1998a) show that standard state space models are incapable of representing unawareness. The model circumvents the impossibility result by endowing the agent with a subjective state space that...

Recent work has reduced the gap between search-based monetary theory and mainstream macroeconomics by incorporating into the search model some centralized markets as well as some decentralized markets where money is essential. This paper takes a further step towards this integration by...

This paper extends Li (2008b) to the multi-agent environment, where players reason about each other’s awareness as well as knowledge, subject to their own awareness constraints. I characterize the interactive knowledge hierarchies under unawareness, which significantly differ from those in the...

Different markets are cleared by different types of prices---seller-specific prices that are uniform across buyers in some markets, and personalized prices tailored to the buyer in others. We examine a setting in which buyers and sellers make investments before matching in a competitive market....