Two-sided matching with spatially differentiated agents

We consider the problem of assigning sellers and buyers into stable matches. The agents are located along a line and the match surplus function is decreasing in the distance between partners. We investigate the structure of stable assignments under both non-transferable utility (NTU) and transferable utility (TU). If the surplus function is sufficiently convex, the TU-stable assignments are a subset of the NTU-stable assignments. Furthermore, if trade is restricted to uni-directional flows the unique TU-stable assignment coincides with the unique NTU-stable assignment for every convex surplus function. We also examine the graph-theoretic representation of stable assignments and show that the graph structure can be exploited to compute surplus shares in TU-stable assignments.