Efficient dynamic matching with costly search

This paper considers a frictional market where buyers and sellers, with unit demand and supply, search for trading opportunities. The analysis focuses on explicit search frictions, allows for two-sided incomplete information, and puts no restriction on agent heterogeneity. In this context, a non-trivial, full trade search equilibrium is shown to exist, equilibria are characterized as the values that satisfy the first order conditions for a non-linear planner's (optimization) problem, and necessary and sufficient conditions are provided for the existence of efficient search equilibria under complete information. These results fully generalize to the twosided incomplete information setting, under an additive separability condition.