Matching and Efficiency in the Baseball Free-Agent System: An Experimental Examination

This article presents the results of an experimental study investigating the problem of allocating heterogeneous indivisible objects using market-like mechanisms. The object of study is the market for professional baseball players in their free-agent year. We investigate both the current free-agency system and a variant of the current system instituted informally by the teams and ruled illegal by arbitrators. We then propose and test a new alternative matching mechanism, which proves to have quite a few desirable characteristics.