Middlemen and the Allocation of Heterogeneous Goods*

Abstract

This article presents a general equilibrium model in which middlemen emerge to facilitate trade in an environment of idiosyncratic tastes and heterogeneous goods.The gains to the traders can be measured along three dimensions: the rate of production, the time-preference losses generated by the matching process, and the quality of the match between consumers' preferences and the goods they ultimately consume.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 74 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.