Application Costs and Congestion in Matching Markets
研究匹配市场中申请成本如何影响拥堵和匹配质量，通过真实市场实验发现低申请成本能有效减少拥堵且不损害匹配质量。
Abstract A matching market often requires recruiting agents, or ‘programmes’, to costly screen ‘applicants’, and congestion increases with the number of applicants to be screened. We investigate the role of application costs: higher costs reduce congestion by discouraging applicants from applying to certain programmes; however, they may harm match quality. In a multiple-elicitation experiment conducted in a real-life matching market, we implement variants of the Gale-Shapley deferred-acceptance mechanism with different application costs. Our experimental and structural estimates show that a (low) application cost effectively reduces congestion without harming match quality.