In an assignment market with uncertainty regarding productive ability of participants, early contracting can occur as participants balance risk sharing and sorting efficiency. More promising agents may contract early with each other because insurance gains outweigh sorting inefficiency, whereas...

I offer a competitive explanation for the rush toward early contracting in matching markets. The explanation does not rely on market power, strategic motives, or instability of the assignment mechanism. Uncertainty about workers' ability will produce inefficient matching if contracts are formed...

This paper takes Gary Becker's efficient marriage market hypothesis at face value and directly confronts it with data from Hong Kong. The theory of optimal assignment is used to develop an empirical model of spouse selection, which resembles a Tobit model. This model can address positive or...

We present a model in which the media provide voters with information that is tainted by their own preferences, and derive an equilibrium in which media endorsements influence voting behavior. Competition for media endorsement causes political parties to adopt more centrist policies, which...

Population size and the level of income per capita are major determinants of the number of medals won by a country in the 1952-2004 Olympic Games. A parsimonious count (Poisson) model fits the data very well: the squared correlation between the predicted value of the number of medals won and the...

"This article proposes a theory of group formation based on the motive to seek informed opinion. Because an individual evaluates whether others are informed or not using his own priors, he identifies people with similar beliefs to be more informed than those with different beliefs. The result is...

Using viewer share and rating points for the Toronto|Hamilton television market, we estimate the demand for U.S. programs retransmitted in Canada and test several hypotheses on the effect of domestic content regulation, program type, simulcasting regulations, network affiliation, and other...

Though individuals prefer to join groups with high quality peers, there are advantages to being high up in the pecking order within a group if higher ranked members of a group have greater access to the group's resources. When two organizations try to attract members from a fixed population of...

When employers cannot tell whether a school truly has many good students or just gives easy grades, schools have an incentive to inflate grades to help mediocre students, despite concerns about preserving the value of good grades for good students. We construct a signaling model where grades are...