I offer a competitive explanation for the rush toward early contracting in matching markets. The explanation does not rely on market power, strategic motives, or instability of the assignment mechanism. Uncertainty about workers' ability will produce inefficient matching if contracts are formed...

This paper considers the problem of a monopoly matchmaker that uses a schedule of entrance fees to sort different types of agents on the two sides of a matching market into different markets, where agents randomly form pairwise matches. We make the standard assumption that the match value...