One-to-Many Matching with Complementary Preferences: An Empirical Study of Market Concentration in Natural Gas Leasing
研究钻井公司与私人土地所有者之间关于矿产权的谈判，发现市场集中度使公司受益但损害土地所有者利益，而要求更多土地所有者让步的模拟实验显示总福利至少提升10%。
In two-sided markets with multidimensional contracting, what are the costs and benefits of market concentration? I study this question using data that describe drilling firm negotiations with private landowners for access to mineral rights. Firms benefit from signing geographically proximate contracts through economies of density. Using newly collected data, I model bilateral negotiations as a one-to-many match between firms and landowners and extend the framework to allow complementary preferences among firms for geographically proximate leases. The model estimates imply substantial market concentration in leasing activity that benefits drilling firms and is costly to private landowners through fewer legal protections. Counterfactual experiments that require more landowner concessions in leasing agreements suggest that landowners’ gains outweigh firms’ costs, increasing total welfare by at least 10%. Moreover, firms do not appear to respond to higher leasing costs by signing many fewer leases, suggesting that firms would have likely continued drilling in Tarrant County.