Superiority of Instantaneous Decisions in Thin Dynamic Matching Markets

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Bäumler, Johannes, Bullinger, Martin, Kober, Stefan, Zhu, Donghao
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2022
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author Bäumler, Johannes
Bullinger, Martin
Kober, Stefan
Zhu, Donghao
author_facet Bäumler, Johannes
Bullinger, Martin
Kober, Stefan
Zhu, Donghao
contents We study a dynamic matching setting where homogeneous agents arrive at random according to a Poisson process and randomly form edges yielding a sparse market. Agents stay in the market according to a certain sojourn time and wait to be matched with a compatible agent by a matching algorithm. When their maximum sojourn time is reached, they perish unmatched. The primary objective is to maximize the number of matched agents. Our main result is to show that a uniformly guaranteed sojourn time suffices to get almost optimal performance of instantaneous matching. Interestingly, this matching policy essentially keeps as few agents in the market as possible. Hence, in contrast to the common paradigm that market thickness is the crucial property for obtaining strong matching performance, we show that the agents' sojourn behavior can be an equally powerful factor. In addition, instantaneous matching is close to optimal with respect to minimizing waiting time. We develop new techniques for proving our results going beyond commonly adopted methods for Markov processes.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2206_10287
institution arXiv
publishDate 2022
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Superiority of Instantaneous Decisions in Thin Dynamic Matching Markets
Bäumler, Johannes
Bullinger, Martin
Kober, Stefan
Zhu, Donghao
Data Structures and Algorithms
Theoretical Economics
We study a dynamic matching setting where homogeneous agents arrive at random according to a Poisson process and randomly form edges yielding a sparse market. Agents stay in the market according to a certain sojourn time and wait to be matched with a compatible agent by a matching algorithm. When their maximum sojourn time is reached, they perish unmatched. The primary objective is to maximize the number of matched agents. Our main result is to show that a uniformly guaranteed sojourn time suffices to get almost optimal performance of instantaneous matching. Interestingly, this matching policy essentially keeps as few agents in the market as possible. Hence, in contrast to the common paradigm that market thickness is the crucial property for obtaining strong matching performance, we show that the agents' sojourn behavior can be an equally powerful factor. In addition, instantaneous matching is close to optimal with respect to minimizing waiting time. We develop new techniques for proving our results going beyond commonly adopted methods for Markov processes.
title Superiority of Instantaneous Decisions in Thin Dynamic Matching Markets
topic Data Structures and Algorithms
Theoretical Economics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.10287