Competitive Wages in a Match with Ordered Contracts

A recent antitrust lawsuit against the National Residency Matching Program renewed interest in understanding the effects of a centralized match on wages of medical residents. Bulow and Levin (forthcoming) propose a simple model of the NRMP, in which firms set impersonal salaries simultaneously, before matching with workers, and show that a match leads to lower aggregate wages compared to any competitive outcome. This paper models a feature present in the NRMP, ordered contracts, that allows firms to set several contracts while determining the order in which they try to fill these contracts. I show that the low wage equilibrium of Bulow and Levin is not robust to this feature of the NRMP, and competitive wages are once more an equilibrium outcome. Furthermore, a match with ordered contracts has different properties than former models of centralized matches with multiple contracts.