Published August 2008
| Version public
Journal Article
What matchings can be stable? The testable implications of matching theory
Abstract
This paper studies the falsifiability of two-sided matching theory when agents' preferences are unknown. A collection of matchings is rationalizable if there are preferences for the agents involved so that the matchings are stable. We show that there are nonrationalizable collections of matchings; hence, the theory is falsifiable. We also characterize the rationalizable collections of matchings, which leads to a test of matching theory in the spirit of revealed-preference tests of individual optimizing behavior.
Additional Information
© 2008 INFORMS. Received November 9, 2006; revised July 9, 2007 and October 23, 2007. The author thanks Area Editor Eilon Solan and two anonymous referees for their detailed comments on a previous draft. He is also grateful to David Ahn, Chris Chambers, Geoffroy De Clippel, Alekos Kechris, Hideo Konishi, Jay Sethuraman, Tayfun Sönmez, and various seminar audiences. Special thanks are due to Lozan Ivanov for carefully proofreading the whole manuscript.Additional details
Identifiers
- Eprint ID
- 12421
- DOI
- 10.1287/moor.1080.0318
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:ECHmor08
Related works
- Describes
- 10.1287/moor.1080.0318 (DOI)
Dates
- Created
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2008-12-11Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
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2021-11-08Created from EPrint's last_modified field