These
days my interests in matching fall into two distinct areas. First and
foremost is my interest in business-to-business markets, which I detail
below. Second is an interest in entry level job markets. Recently, I
have become interested in the market for new PhDs in marketing
(with Cesar Zamudio).
This work is under progress, and I will not include it here until
later. However, we have some results and some slides and I will be
happy to share these results and material upon request. Also, Cesar Zamudio has all the recent stuff on his webpage.
and since he is the one doing 99% of the work (he is the student), you
can probably get more current information from his website.
Matching and Business-to-Business Markets
The
kind of markets I am most interested in are procurement
(business-to-business) markets. When buyers and suppliers are
indifferent over one another, you get nice demand and supply
curves, which lead to equilibrium. When buyers and suppliers have
strict preferences over one another, as is typically the case in
business-to-business markets, then you generally have to resort
to matching theory.
1. A while back I wrote a nice review article on the importance of matching in explaining procurement markets.
2.
One feature of business-to-business marketing is that businesses
repeatedly transact with one another in a repeated game. Utku Unver and
I have shown that such a repeated game results in stable outcomes which
are predictable (the paper is not positioned in terms of
business-to-business because readers seemed to hate this framing at the
time).
3. Sherry Li, Kutsal Dogan and I have taken the above
result to the next level by adding prices into the repeated interaction.
4. With my student, Cesar Zamudio,
we have obtained some preliminary results on the matching of brands and celebrity endorsers.