Couples looking for jobs in the same labor market may cause instabilities. We determine a natural preference domain, the domain of weakly responsive preferences, that guarantees stability. Under a restricted unemployment aversion condition we show that this domain is maximal for the existence of...

We study procedurally fair matching mechanisms that produce stable matchings for the so-called marriage model of one-to-one, two-sided matching. Our main focus is on two such mechanisms: employment by lotto introduced by Aldershof et al. (1999) and the random order mechanism due to Roth and...

We study employment by lotto (Aldershof et al., 1999), a procedurally fair matching algorithm for the so-called stable marriage problem. We complement Aldershof et al.'s (1999) analysis in two ways. First, we give an alternative and intuitive description of employment by lotto in terms of a...

We consider one-to-one matching (roommate) problems in which agents (students) can either be matched as pairs or remain single. The aim of this paper is twofold. First, we review a key result for roommate problems (the "lonely wolf" theorem) for which we provide a concise and elementary proof....

In this note we study the National Resident Matching Program (NRMP) algorithm in the US market for physicians. We report on two problems that concern the presence of couples, a feature explicitly incorporated in the new NRMP algorithm (cf. Roth and Peranson, 1999). First, we show that the new...

We experimentally investigate in the laboratory two prominent mechanisms that are employed in school choice programs to assign students to public schools. We study how individual behavior is influenced by preference intensities and risk aversion. Our main results show that (a) the GaleShapley...

We show that the full version of the so-called "rural hospital theorem" generalizes to many-to-many matching problems where agents on both sides of the problem have substitutable and weakly separable preferences. We reinforce our result by showing that when agents' preferences satisfy...

Recently, several school districts in the US have adopted or consider adopting the Student-Optimal Stable mechanism or the Top Trading Cycles mechanism to assign children to public schools. There is evidence that for school districts that employ (variants of) the so-called Boston mechanism the...

The literature on school choice assumes that families can submit a preference list over all the schools they want to be assigned to. However, in many real-life instances families are only allowed to submit a list containing a limited number of schools. Subjects incentives are drastically...

We consider two-sided many-to-many matching markets in which each worker may work for multiple firms and each firm may hire multiple workers. We study individual and group manipulations in centralized markets that employ (pairwise) stable mechanisms and that require participants to submit rank...