Matching Markets in Baseball Free Agency
This article discusses the the market of Major League Baseball free agency and investigates the problem of allocating numerous indivisible player assets among 28 teams at the time of the study. The authors look into both the current system of free agency in place as well as a now-ruled illegal system instituted informally by the owners as a means of keeping salaries down. Free agency had only been in place for about 20 years at the time of this study, so further research would surely help to improve many of the points made in this article.
The authors of this article also propose and test an alternative matching mechanism, which proves to have quite a few desirable characteristics. They find that this mechanism often lead to better and more profitable matches for both the teams and the players in varying situations. Some of the features of this system may be able to prove beneficial to the current system of Major League free agency. It would be very interesting to see any further research on this topic especially given the infancy of this research at the time and the current state of collective bargaining tensions in the MLB today.