@article{73aae87f48084be58ae6a764cde6cebc,
title = "Strategic limitation of market accessibility: search platform design and welfare",
abstract = "This paper explores the relationship between market accessibility and various participants' welfare in an intermediated directed-search market. For a general class of meeting technologies, we provide a necessary and sufficient condition under which efficiency requires imperfect accessibility, such that each seller's listing is only observed by some but not all buyers. We show that the platform optimally implements the efficient outcome, but fully extracts surplus from the transactions it intermediates. We also find that in general, buyers prefer to minimize market accessibility, while sellers prefer a weakly greater accessibility level than that which is socially efficient. The efficiency of imperfect accessibility is robust to the introduction of a second chance for unmatched buyers to search.",
keywords = "Accessibility, Intermediation, Meeting technology, Platform, Search",
author = "Christopher Teh and Chengsi Wang and Makoto Watanabe",
note = "Funding Information: We would like to thank Arthur Campbell, Guillermo Caruana, Pedro Gomis-Porqueras, Sunny Huang, Bel{\'e}n Jerez, Michihiro Kandori, Michael Manove, Hodaka Morita, Susumu Sato, Xiaojian Zhao, Jidong Zhou as well as audiences at Deakin, Hitotsubashi, HKUST, Keio, Monash, Tokyo, UC3M, Waseda, and EARIE 2021 for their comments and suggestions. Chengsi Wang gratefully acknowledges financial support from the German Research Foundation Project PE 813/2-2 and the Australian Research Council Discovery Project DP210102015. Makoto Watanabe gratefully acknowledges financial support from the Japanese government, Japan Society for the Promotion of Science KAKENHI Grant Number 22K20161 and 23H00054, and the Murata Science Foundation 2022 Research Grant.The authors declare the following financial interests/personal relationships which may be considered as potential competing interests: Chengsi Wang reports financial support was provided by Australian Research Council. Makoto Watanabe reports financial support was provided by Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. Chengsi Wang reports financial support was provided by German Research Foundation. Makoto Watanabe reports financial support was provided by Murata Science Foundation. Funding Information: We would like to thank Arthur Campbell, Guillermo Caruana, Pedro Gomis-Porqueras, Sunny Huang, Bel{\'e}n Jerez, Michihiro Kandori, Michael Manove, Hodaka Morita, Susumu Sato, Xiaojian Zhao, Jidong Zhou as well as audiences at Deakin, Hitotsubashi, HKUST, Keio, Monash, Tokyo, UC3M, Waseda, and EARIE 2021 for their comments and suggestions. Chengsi Wang gratefully acknowledges financial support from the German Research Foundation Project PE 813/2-2 and the Australian Research Council Discovery Project DP210102015 . Makoto Watanabe gratefully acknowledges financial support from the Japanese government, Japan Society for the Promotion of Science KAKENHI Grant Number 22K20161 and 23H00054 , and the Murata Science Foundation 2022 Research Grant. Publisher Copyright: {\textcopyright} 2024 The Author(s)",
year = "2024",
month = mar,
doi = "10.1016/j.jet.2024.105798",
language = "English",
volume = "216",
journal = "Journal of Economic Theory",
issn = "0022-0531",
publisher = "Elsevier",
}