Do experts help in two-sided search?

We study agents matching to form teams in a distributed multi-agent environment. Each agent receives information about the potential value of teaming with others. This information signal may be noisy. If all candidate agents agree to the matching the team is formed and each agent receives the true unknown utility of the matching, and leaves the market. We consider the effect of the presence of information brokers, or experts, on the outcomes of such matching processes. Experts can, upon payment of a fee, perform the service of finding and revealing the true value of a match to any agent. We analyze the equilibrium formed in the two-sided search setting, given the fee set by a monopolist expert. We then derive the revenue maximizing strategy for the expert as the first mover in a Stackelberg game. We find that better information can hurt: the presence of the expert, even if the use of its services is optional, can degrade individual agents' utilities and overall social welfare. While in one-sided search the presence of the expert can only help, in two-sided search the externality imposed by the fact that others are consulting the expert can lead to a situation where the equilibrium outcome is that everyone consults the expert, even though all agents would be better off if the expert were not present. As an antidote, we show how market designers can enhance welfare by subsidizing the expert to make her services more expensive, instead of providing conventional subsidies which reduce consumer costs.