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...

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...