The histories of seven regional markets for new physicians and surgeons in the United Kingdom are considered. Like the American market, these markets have experienced failures that led to the adoption of centralized market mechanisms. Because different regions employ different centralized...

Laboratory data from bargaining experiments have started a debate about the prospects for various parts of game theory as descriptive theories of observable behavior and about whether, to what extent, and how a successful descriptive theory must take into account peoples' perceptions of...

This paper concerns the difficulties associated with establishing a time at which a market will operate. The authors first describe the experience of several dozen markets and submarkets, from entry-level professional labor markets in the United States, Canada, England, and Japan to the...

The potential transactions evaluated in labor markets before equilibrium is identified involve rejected offers. After an initial phase in which many offers can be made simultaneously, a new offer cannot be made until an outstanding offer is rejected, so even a small time required to process...

The authors examine learning in all experiments they could locate involving one hundred periods or more of games with a unique equilibrium in mixed strategies, and in a new experiment. They study both the ex post ('best fit') descriptive power of learning models, and their ex ante predictive...

The college admissions problem is perhaps the simplest model of many-to-one matching in two-sided markets, such as labor markets. The authors show that the set of stable outcomes (which is equal to the core defined by weak domination) has some surprising properties not found in models of...