Wisdom and Foolishness of Noisy Matching Markets

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Peng, Kenny, Garg, Nikhil
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Peng, Kenny
Garg, Nikhil
author_facet Peng, Kenny
Garg, Nikhil
contents We consider a many-to-one matching market where colleges share true preferences over students but make decisions using only independent noisy rankings. Each student has a true value $v$, but each college $c$ ranks the student according to an independently drawn estimated value $v + X_c$ for $X_c\sim \mathcal{D}.$ We ask a basic question about the resulting stable matching: How noisy is the set of matched students? Two striking effects can occur in large markets (i.e., with a continuum of students and a large number of colleges). When $\mathcal{D}$ is light-tailed, noise is fully attenuated: only the highest-value students are matched. When $\mathcal{D}$ is long-tailed, noise is fully amplified: students are matched uniformly at random. These results hold for any distribution of student preferences over colleges, and extend to when only subsets of colleges agree on true student valuations instead of the entire market. More broadly, our framework provides a tractable approach to analyze implications of imperfect preference formation in large markets.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2402_16771
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Wisdom and Foolishness of Noisy Matching Markets
Peng, Kenny
Garg, Nikhil
Theoretical Economics
Computer Science and Game Theory
Probability
We consider a many-to-one matching market where colleges share true preferences over students but make decisions using only independent noisy rankings. Each student has a true value $v$, but each college $c$ ranks the student according to an independently drawn estimated value $v + X_c$ for $X_c\sim \mathcal{D}.$ We ask a basic question about the resulting stable matching: How noisy is the set of matched students? Two striking effects can occur in large markets (i.e., with a continuum of students and a large number of colleges). When $\mathcal{D}$ is light-tailed, noise is fully attenuated: only the highest-value students are matched. When $\mathcal{D}$ is long-tailed, noise is fully amplified: students are matched uniformly at random. These results hold for any distribution of student preferences over colleges, and extend to when only subsets of colleges agree on true student valuations instead of the entire market. More broadly, our framework provides a tractable approach to analyze implications of imperfect preference formation in large markets.
title Wisdom and Foolishness of Noisy Matching Markets
topic Theoretical Economics
Computer Science and Game Theory
Probability
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.16771