Competition may increase social utility in bipartite matching problem

Abstract

Bipartite matching problem is to study two disjoint groups of agents who need to be matched pairwise. It can be applied to many real-world scenarios and explain many social phenomena. In this article, we study the effect of competition on bipartite matching problem by introducing conformity into the preference structure. The results show that a certain amount of competition can improve the overall utility of society and also eliminate the giant shift of social utility when matching unequal numbers of men and women.