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Optimal and enhanced treatment attends to parameters that distinguish individual patients beyond the nature of the depression itself. They differ from the basic guidelines described in that they require some special expertise on the part of the clinician and frequently entail the monitoring of actual in-therapy activity in order to ensure that the moment-to-moment interventions are compatible with the needs and reactions of the patient. This chapter summarizes the results of the effort to cross-validate those preliminary principles that relate to the selection of specific treatment models and philosophies or of particular classes and families of techniques. These are the guidelines that seek to apply optimal matches of treatments to patients. Here, the focus is on optimal guidelines, those that may require special clinician training and monitoring of in-session treatment. This chapter also assesses the predictive efficiency of three models from the psychotherapy research and compares them to that of the more elaborate systematic treatment selection model: the common factors model, the psychotherapy procedures model, and the technical-eclectic therapy matching model.

This chapter considers two related puzzles that are directly related to family formation (and dissolution) and to intrafamily allocation: the first deals with the increase in inequality in the United States in recent decades, and the second has to do with some remarkable trends in gender-specific demand for higher education. In addition, it also describes the main features of matching models, including a frictionless environment and notion of transfers, with particular emphasis on nontransferable utility, transferable utility, and imperfectly transferable utility. Finally, it discusses existing models of household behavior, such as the unitary model, the collective model, and noncooperative models, as well as bargaining models of the household. An overview of the book's content is also presented.

This chapter considers the theory of matching under transferable utility (TU). It first introduces a formal definition of the TU property: a group satisfies TU if there exists monotone transformations of individual utilities such that the Pareto frontier is a hyperplane. It then examines the cornerstone of the theory of nontransferable utility (NTU) matching, namely, the Gale-Shapley algorithm, before turning to a discussion of a crucial property of matching models under TU: their intrinsic relationship with optimal transportation. It also describes the notions of supermodularity and assortativeness, along with individual utilities and intrahousehold allocation. Finally, it looks at hedonic models, taking into account hedonic equilibrium and stable matching, and presents two examples that illustrate the relationship between matching and hedonic models: a competitive IO model and randomized matching.

This chapter considers some extensions of matching models under transferable utility (TU). It begins with a discussion of preinvestment, in which agents deliberately invest in education, and the stock of human capital that characterizes them when entering the marriage market is therefore (at least partly) endogenous. It is safe to assume that agents, when deciding their investment, take into account, among other things, its impact on the marriage market. An alternative argument is that agents are likely to invest too much. The chapter proceeds by analyzing the relevance of TU to risk sharing, multidimensional matching, and the roommate matching problem, taking into account the existence of a stable matching and the cloned bipartite problem. Finally, it describes the basic model of divorce and remarriage, focusing on compensations in the Becker-Coase theorem as well as violations of the theorem.

This chapter presents two main ideas to deal with arbitrary (that is, not necessarily balanced) strings. The first idea aims to transform strings into permutations, using the match-and-prune model in order to minimize the distance or maximize the similarity between the resulting permutations. Section 8.1 presents this model. The second idea is based on counting the number of operations needed to transform one string into another. Inserting, duplicating, replacing, or deleting a character or, more generally, a substring are operations that allow us to change the content of a string as needed. This is subsequently called the block edit model, which is surveyed in Section 8.2.

This chapter describes the basic notions of matching with transfers. It first introduces the notations that will be used throughout the book, including two compact, separable metric spaces: the space of female characteristics and the space of male characteristics. In particular, it outlines a framework that is common to all (bipartite, one-to-one) matching models. It then considers how a matching problem is defined in the nontransferable utility, transferable utility, and imperfectly transferable utility cases. It also explains how the solution is defined in all three cases, noting that there are differences in the definition of an equilibrium. In all cases, the basic equilibrium concept is stability.

This chapter considers two examples of applications of matching models under transferable utility (TU). The first example deals with the legalization of abortion by virtue of Roe v. Wade and the feminist claim that it empowered all women. The second example deals with the discrepancy between male and female demand for higher education over the last decades. After providing an overview of Roe v. Wade and how it resulted in female empowerment, the chapter describes the model that takes into account preferences and budget constraints, stable matching on the marriage market, and changes in birth control technology. It then examines gender differences in the demand for higher education using the CIW (Chiappori, Iyigun, and Weiss) model, with a focus on equilibrium, preferences for singlehood, comparative statics, empirical implementation, and the Low model showing that higher education results in a deterministic drop in fertility.

This chapter describes the comparison of hedonic and matched-model (MM) indexes for apparel prices in the United States using Sears catalogue data over the period 1914–1993, and compares the resulting indexes with the corresponding Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) apparel index over the same period. The research, which is based on roughly 10,000 exact comparisons for the matched-model (MM) index and another 6,500 observations on the prices and quality characteristics of women's dresses, leads to several conclusions and numerous questions for further research. The chapter explains that the Sears MM indexes do not exhibit a consistent negative or positive drift relative to their BLS Consumer Price Index counterparts. It is found that the hedonic price index for women's apparel always increases more rapidly than the corresponding MM index.

This concluding chapter discusses the progress that has been made with matching models on both the theoretical and the empirical front. Regarding theory, the power and the limits of the transferable utility (TU) model are now better understood. The TU framework can (admittedly under specific assumptions on preferences) encompass most aspects of family economics, including fertility, domestic production, risk sharing, and the consumption of public commodities. On the empirical side, the econometrics of matching models have seen several major advances, with the Choo-Siow model as a prime example. The chapter also considers what matching models teach us about reality, such as the asymmetry between male and female demand for higher education, and the relationship between assortative matching and inequality. Furthermore, a host of social issues can only be analyzed from a general equilibrium perspective; this is evident in the case of Roe v. Wade.

This chapter deals with the “direct characteristics method” approach, in which the index change between two periods is computed using separate hedonic functions estimated for each period. It compares this method, which is called the “hedonic imputation method,” to the usual time dummy approach to hedonic regressions, and derives the exact conditions under which the two approaches to hedonic regressions will give the same two main and quite distinct approaches to the measurement of hedonic price indexes: time dummy hedonic indexes and hedonic imputation indexes. The chapter considers both weighted and unweighted hedonic regressions and finds exact algebraic expressions that explain the difference between the hedonic imputation and time dummy hedonic regression models. The weighting is chosen so that we are actually in a matched model situation for the two periods being considered, then the resulting hedonic regression measures of price change resemble standard superlative index number formulae.

This chapter considers matching models under imperfectly transferable utility (ITU). Some of the techniques used in the transferable utility (TU) case can be extended to an ITU framework; for example, the Spence-Mirrlees condition, which is sufficient for positive assortative matching (PAM), can be generalized to the ITU case. Furthermore, individual utilities may be recovered (up to a constant, as in the TU case), using techniques which are essentially similar to their TU counterpart. After providing an overview of the basic notions and theoretical framework of matching under ITU, the chapter discusses the recovery of individual utilities, PAM, and econometrics of ITU. It also presents two examples of applications of ITU techniques, one dealing with matching on wages and the other with endogenous Pareto weights.

This chapter examines Daniel Wegner’s claim that the conscious will is an illusion and argues that the content of the “experience of conscious will” is more complicated than has been assumed. It also suggests that, although further explanation is required to elucidate the role of the self and intention in the production of action, the phenomenology of agency is unlikely to be systematically misleading. In addition, our experience of ourselves as agents who do things for reasons does not necessarily lead us into error. After describing Wegner’s matching model of the conscious will, the chapter considers whether we experience our actions as caused by consciousness. It also looks at the argument from eliminativism.

Pittsburgh has many beautiful old houses, most of which have thick plaster walls. The walls are good in the sense that they effectively reduce noise coming from other rooms, but bad in the sense that they sometimes force me to interact with plasterers. My experience with plasterers has not been fun. The ones who have come to do repairs on my house haven’t put drop cloths below where they worked, have resisted or ignored requests not to smoke in the house, and have flicked cigarette ashes wherever they went. Several of them smelled bad and had alcohol on their breath, even at 8:00 A.M. On the other hand, they were really good at plastering. They fixed cracks and holes quickly and without apparent difficulty. The finished product, once painted, matched the surrounding wall or ceiling remarkably well. My own attempts at plastering have been much less successful. These attempts have taught me quite a bit, but unfortunately not how to do the job. I have learned that plastering requires many good strategy choices. Home plastering kits indicate how much plaster powder and water to mix together, and roughly when to apply the mixture, but that is only the beginning of the problem. When exactly has the plaster jelled sufficiently to apply it? If it’s too watery, it will run; if it’s too thick, it will be wavy, and soon will crack. The instructions also do not illustrate the wrist movements for applying the plaster. The package directs the reader to apply the plaster with “flexible,” “supple,” and “smooth” movements, but what does that mean? Despite considerable time spent thinking about how to plaster, and some time spent watching plasterers, my decisions invariably lead to wavy, cracked surfaces resembling those of an artistically challenged kindergaitner. I occasionally have asked the plasterers who came to my house how they know when the plaster is ready and how it should be applied. Their replies: “You just look at it.” “You can see when it’s ready.” “You put it on smoothly.” True enough, I’m sure, but not helpful.

This chapter provides a description of basic price index techniques, the intuition underlying their construction, and how one interprets the results. In particular, the chapter provides instructions on how to construct fixed-based and chained indexes and discusses some of the common problems, like substitution bias, the new goods problem and chain drift. It also discusses the intuition behind two popular interpretations of price indexes: the cost of living index interpretation and the constant-quality price index interpretation. The formulas considered are: Laspeyres, Paasche, Fisher Ideal, Tornquist, Jevons.

This chapter discusses the problem of unemployment in a dynamic and intertemporal framework. It emphasizes flows in and out of unemployment through the matching function model. It explains a simple common discrete time dynamic framework, as well as the basic employment flows. It also focuses on the shirking model to show how one can go from a static to a dynamic model by extending to a dynamic environment.