Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/58593 
Year of Publication: 
2012
Series/Report no.: 
IZA Discussion Papers No. 6533
Publisher: 
Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), Bonn
Abstract: 
This paper presents a tractable framework for studying frictionless matching in school, work, and marriage when individuals have heterogeneous social and cognitive skills. In the model, there are gains to specialization and team production, but specialization requires communication and coordination between team members, and individuals with more social skills communicate and coordinate at lower resource cost. The theory delivers full task specialization in the labor and education markets, but incomplete specialization in marriage. It also captures well-known matching patterns in each of these sectors, including the commonly observed many-to-one matches in firms and schools. Equilibrium is equivalent to the solution of a utilitarian social planner solving a linear programming problem.
Subjects: 
social skill
cognitive skill
matching
sorting
education
labor
marriage
social welfare
linear programming
JEL: 
E24
J12
J24
J31
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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