Men's and women's preferences are intercorrelated to the extent that men rank highly those women who rank them highly. Intercorrelation plays an important but overlooked role in determining outcomes of matching mechanisms. We employ simulation techniques to quantify the effects of...

Take the fort, then take the city. In a two-stage, two-party contest, victory in the initial stage can provide an advantage in the final stage. We examine such momentum in conflict scenarios and investigate how valuable it must be to avoid a Pyrrhic victory. Our main finding is that although the...

Agents on the same side of a two-sided matching market (such as the marriage or labor market) compete with each other by making self-enhancing investments to improve their worth in the eyes of potential partners. Because these expenditures generally occur prior to matching, this activity has...