Matching in Dynamic Imbalanced Markets

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Ashlagi, Itai; Nikzad, Afshin; Strack, Philipp
• 署名单位: University of Southern California; Yale University
• 刊物名称: REVIEW OF ECONOMIC STUDIES
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0034-6527
• DOI: 10.1093/restud/rdac044
• 发表日期: 2023
• 页码: 1084-1124
• 关键词: kidney; Donation

摘要

We study dynamic matching in exchange markets with easy- and hard-to-match agents. A greedy policy, which attempts to match agents upon arrival, ignores the positive externality that waiting agents provide by facilitating future matchings. We prove that the trade-off between a thicker market and faster matching vanishes in large markets; the greedy policy leads to shorter waiting times and more agents matched than any other policy. We empirically confirm these findings in data from the National Kidney Registry. Greedy matching achieves as many transplants as commonly used policies (1.8% more than monthly batching) and shorter waiting times (16 days faster than monthly batching).