Designing a two-sided matching protocol under asymmetric information

Abstract

We have developed a new two-sided matching protocol including job applicants and employers in the condition that applicants have conditional preferences and well informed applicants exist. In past research, two-sided matching has covered some assignment problems such as residency matching. However, in the case of matching on the information network, different applicants are differently informed and well informed applicants hide its information to obtain more desirable matching. That is, asymmetric information possessed by applicants causes unstable matching. To overcome this difficulty, we design a new two-sided matching protocol in which applicants are allowed to report their conditional preferences and well informed applicants generally have an incentive to share information among applicants by allowing applicants to report their conditional preferences and deciding the matching on the basis of the preferences of applicants who share information (informers). We experimentally evaluated our protocol through simulation and found that the protocol can attain more satisfactory matching. © 2009 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.