Researching with Whom? Stability and Manipulation

This paper explores the existence of stable research teams, when each agent's preferences depend on the set of researchers collaborating with her. We introduce a property over researchers' preferences, called tops responsiveness guaranteeing the existence of stable research teams configurations. We also provide a stable mechanism, induced by the so-called tops covering algorithm, which is strategy-proof when researchers preferences satisfy tops responsiveness. Furthermore, we also find out that, in this framework the tops covering mechanism is the unique strategy-proof mechanism that always selects stable allocations.