We show how frictions and continuous transfers jointly affect equilibria in a model of matching in trading networks. Our model incorporates distortionary frictions such as transaction taxes and commissions. When contracts are fully substitutable for firms, competitive equilibria exist and coincide with outcomes that satisfy a cooperative solution concept called trail stability. However, competitive equilibria are generally neither stable nor Pareto‐efficient.
We consider general networks of bilateral contracts that include supply chains. We define a new stability concept, called trail stability, and show that any network of bilateral contracts has a trailstable outcome whenever agents' choice functions satisfy full substitutability. Trail stability is a natural extension of chain stability, but is a stronger solution concept in general contract networks. Trail-stable outcomes are not immune to deviations of arbitrary sets of firms. In fact, we show that outcomes satisfying an even more demanding stability property -full trail stability -always exist. For fully trailstable outcomes, we prove results on the lattice structure, the rural hospitals theorem, strategy-proofness and comparative statics of firm entry and exit. We pin down a condition under which trail-stable and fully trail-stable outcomes coincide. We then completely describe the relationships between various other concepts. When contracts specify trades and prices, we also show that competitive equilibrium exists in networked markets even in the absence of fully transferrable utility. The competitive equilibrium outcome is (fully) trail-stable.Keywords: trail stability, chain stability, set stability, matching markets, supply chains, networks, contracts, competitive equilibrium.JEL Classification: C78, L14 * We would like to thank Samson Alva, Scott Kominers and Michael Ostrovsky for their valuable comments on the recent versions of the paper. Vincent Crawford, Umut Dur, Jens Gudmundsson, Claudia Herrestahl, Paul Klemperer, Collin Raymond, and Zaifu Yang also gave great comments on much earlier drafts. We had enlightening conversations with Alex Nichifor, Alex Westkamp and M. Bumin Yenmez about the project. Moreover, we are also grateful to seminar participants at the Southern
We build an abstract model, closely related to the stable marriage problem and motivated by Hungarian college admissions. We study different stability notions and show that an extension of the lattice property of stable marriages holds in these more general settings, even if the choice function on one side is not path independent. We lean on Tarski's fixed point theorem and the substitutability property of choice functions. The main virtue of the work is that it exhibits practical, interesting examples, where non-path independent choice functions play a role, and proves various stability-related results.
We show how frictions and continuous transfers jointly affect equilibria in a model of matching in trading networks. Our model incorporates distortionary frictions such as transaction taxes and commissions. When contracts are fully substitutable for firms, competitive equilibria exist and coincide with outcomes that satisfy a cooperative solution concept called trail stability. However, competitive equilibria are generally neither stable nor Pareto-efficient.
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