Theoretical Economics, Volume 17, Number 4 (November 2022)

Theoretical Economics 17 (2022), 1651–1682


On the revealed preference analysis of stable aggregate matchings

Thomas Demuynck, Umutcan Salman

Abstract


Echenique, Lee, Shum, and Yenmez (2013) established the testable revealed preference restrictions for stable aggregate matching with transferable (TU) and non-transferable utility (NTU) and for extremal stable matchings. In this paper, we rephrase their restrictions in terms of properties on a corresponding bipartite graph. From this, we obtain a simple condition that verifies whether a given aggregate matching is rationalisable. For matchings that are not rationalisable, we provide a simple greedy algorithm that computes the minimum number of matches that needs to be removed to obtain a rationalisable matching. We also show that the related problem of finding the minimum number of types that we need to remove in order to obtain a rationalisable matching is NP-complete.

Keywords: Revealed preference theory, two-sided matching markets, stability, computational complexity, matroid

JEL classification: C78, D11

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