Summary
This paper explores the possibility of designing strategy-proof mechanisms yielding satisfactory solutions to the marriage and to the college admissions problem. Our first result is negative. We prove that no strategy-proof mechanism can always choose marriages that are individually rational and Pareto efficient. This strengthens a result by Roth (1982) showing that strategy-proof mechanisms cannot always select stable marriages. The result also applies, a fortiori, to college admissions. Since finding difficulties with strategy-proofness is quite an expected result, we then address a second question which is classical within the incentives literature. Are there restrictions on the preferences of agents under which strategy-proof and stable mechanisms do exist? We identify a nontrivial restriction on the domain of preferences, to be called top dominance, under which there exist strategy-proof and stable mechanisms for both types of matching problems. The mechanisms turn out to be exactly those that derive from the most classical algorithms in the literature; namely, the women's optimal, the men's optimal and the student's optimal. Finally, top dominance is shown to be essentially necessary, as well as sufficient, for the existence of strategy-proof stable matching mechanisms.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Alcalde, J.: Implementing stable solutions to the marriage problem. Mimeographed, Barcelona 1992
Barberà, S., Jackson, M.: A characterization of strategy-proof social choice functions for economies with pure public goods. Soc. Choice Welfare11 (1994) forthcoming
Barberà, S., Sonneschein, H., Zhou, L.: Voting by committees. Econometrica59, 595–609 (1991)
Gale, D., Shapley, L.: College admissions and the stability of marriage. Am. Math. Monthly69, 9–15 (1962)
Gibbard, A.: Manipulation of voting schemes: a general result. Econometrica41, 587–601 (1973)
Green, J., Laffont, J.-J.: Incentives in public decision-making. North Holland: Amsterdam 1979
Moulin, H.: On strategy-proofness and single-peakedness. Public Choice35, 437–56 (1980)
Roth, A. E.: The economics of matching: stability and incentives. Math. Operat. Res.7, 617–628 (1982)
Roth, A. E., Sotomayor, M.: Two-sided matching: a study in game-theoretic modeling and analysis. Econometric Society Monograph Series. New York: Cambridge University Press 1990
Satterthwaite, M. A.: Strategy-proofness and Arrow's conditions: existence and correspondence theorems for voting procedures and social welfare functions. J. Econ. Theory10, 187–217 (1975)
Sprumont, Y.: The division problem with single-peaked preferences: a characterization of the uniform allocation rule. Econometrica59, 509–519 (1991)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Additional information
This work is partially supported by grant PB 89-0294, from the Directión General de Investigatión Ciencia y Tecnología of the Spanish Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia. Salvador Barberà is also grateful to the Instituto de Estudios Fiscales. This research was initiated while both authors were visting GREMAQ, Université des Sciencies Sociales, Toulouse, whose hospitality is gratefully acknowledged. The paper extends results that were circulated as GREMAQ W.P. 91.22.232. We are grateful to Matthew Jackson and Marilda Sotomayor for their comments.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Alcalde, J., Barberà, S. Top dominance and the possibility of strategy-proof stable solutions to matching problems. Econ Theory 4, 417–435 (1994). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01215380
Received:
Revised:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01215380