Stability concepts in matching under distributional constraints

Many real matching markets are subject to distributional constraints. To guide market designers faced with constraints, we propose new stability concepts. A matching is strongly stable if satisfying blocking pairs inevitably violates a constraint. We show that a strongly stable matching may not exis...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inJournal of economic theory Vol. 168; pp. 107 - 142
Main Authors Kamada, Yuichiro, Kojima, Fuhito
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Elsevier Inc 01.03.2017
Subjects
Distributional constraints
Efficiency
Matching
Stability
Strategy-proofness
D63
Matching
Stability
Distributional constraints
Efficiency
D47
Strategy-proofness
C70
D61
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Summary:Many real matching markets are subject to distributional constraints. To guide market designers faced with constraints, we propose new stability concepts. A matching is strongly stable if satisfying blocking pairs inevitably violates a constraint. We show that a strongly stable matching may not exist, and that existence is guaranteed if and only if all distributional constraints are trivial. To overcome this difficulty, we propose a more permissive concept, weak stability. We demonstrate a weakly stable matching always exists, implies efficiency, and is characterized by standard normative axioms. These results are obtained in a more general environment than those in existing studies, accommodating a wide variety of applications.
ISSN:0022-0531
1095-7235
DOI:10.1016/j.jet.2016.12.006