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Econometrica Vol. 74 No. 3 2006

Assortative Matching with Explicit Search Costs

Alp E. Atakan

General Hospital Ernakulam

Abstract

In this paper, I analyze a decentralized search and matching economy with transferable utility composed of heterogeneous agents. I explore whether Becker's assortative matching result generalizes to an economy where agents engage in costly search. In an economy with explicit additive search costs, complementarities in joint production (supermodularity of the joint production function) lead to assortative matching. This is in contrast to previous literature, which had shown that in a search economy with discounting, assortative matching may fail even when the joint production function is supermodular.

DOI
10.1111/j.1468-0262.2006.00678.x
Volume
74
Issue
3
Pages
667-680
Language
en
Sources
bibtex:phds-export.bib openalex crossref

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