Job Re-Matching

Speaker：Sun Ning, Chair Professor, Southern University of Science and Technology

Host：Dai Yun, Associate Professor, Lingnan College

Time and Date：14:30, April 28, 2026 (Tuesday)

Venue：W.T.Chan Auditorium, Lingnan Hall

Language：English + Chinese

Abstract：

This paper studies job re-matching in a two-sided labor market with contractual commitments. We extend the Kelso–Crawford framework by allowing firms and workers to possess commitments to their initial partners and to renegotiate buyout payments. Under the gross substitutes condition, we prove the existence of competitive equilibrium arrangements via a worker-proposing algorithm with endogenous buyouts. We show that equilibrium allocations satisfy participation constraints and lie in the strict core, and that the set of competitive equilibrium price systems forms a lattice. Our analysis highlights that endogenous buyouts can restore efficiency that would otherwise be lost under exogenous commitment terms.

Profile:

Sun Ning is a Chair Professor in the Department of Applied Economics (in preparation) at the School of Business, Southern University of Science and Technology. He previously served as a tenured professor at Shanghai University of Finance and Economics and as the Dean of the Institute for Social and Economic Research at Nanjing Audit University. His long-term teaching and research focus on microeconomic theory, auction mechanism design, and market mechanism design. He has published over twenty papers in top-tier domestic and international journals, including the American Economic Review, Econometrica, the Journal of Political Economy, the Review of Economic Studies, and Economic Research Journal. He is an internationally renowned scholar in the field of market mechanism design. He currently serves or has served as an Associate Editor for the Journal of Mathematical Economics and the Journal of Mechanism and Institution Design, an Editorial Board Member for International Studies of Economics and the Journal of Econometrics, and the Chair of the Game Theory Branch of the Operations Research Society of China.