Abstract: In adoption matching, prospective adoptive parents (families) who wish to adopt a child from the US foster care system should be matched to a child who is waiting to be adopted. In this research project, we formally analyze two different approaches to adoption matching: family-driven search (FS), where families are actively searching for children and caseworkers (i.e., social workers responsible for a child) only respond to requests from families, and caseworker-driven search (CS), where caseworkers are actively searching and families only respond to requests from caseworkers. I am going to present preliminary results from this research project. First, we develop formal models for FS and CS. Our analysis shows that in both models all agents (i.e., families and caseworkers) can always best-respond to the actions of other agents with certain threshold strategies. We propose an equilibrium concept suitable for this search and matching environment, and we show that the set of equilibria in both FS and CS is always non-empty. Further, we find that neither approach is necessarily better for the children: equilibrium child welfare can be arbitrarily better with either search approach. The same holds for families. Finally, we show that as search costs disappear, the two models become equivalent.
