Econometrica

Journal Of The Econometric Society

An International Society for the Advancement of Economic
Theory in its Relation to Statistics and Mathematics

Edited by: Guido W. Imbens • Print ISSN: 0012-9682 • Online ISSN: 1468-0262

Econometrica: Mar, 2010, Volume 78, Issue 2

Sorting and Decentralized Price Competition

https://doi.org/10.3982/ECTA7953
p. 539-574

Jan Eeckhout, Philipp Kircher

We investigate the role of search frictions in markets with price competition and how it leads to sorting of heterogeneous agents. There are two aspects of value creation: the match value when two agents actually trade and the probability of trading governed by the search technology. We show that positive assortative matching obtains when complementarities in the former outweigh complementarities in the latter. This happens if and only if the match‐value function is , that is, its th root is supermodular, where reflects the elasticity of substitution of the search technology. This condition is weaker than the condition required for positive assortative matching in markets with random search.


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