Subjective Homophily and the Fixtures Problem

The Stable Fixtures problem (Irving and Scott (2007)) is a generalized matching model that nests the well-known Stable Roommates, Stable Marriage, and College Admissions problems as special cases. This paper extends a result of the Stable Roommates problem to demonstrate that a class of homophilic p...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Joseph E. Duggan
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: MDPI AG 2020-02-01
Series:Games
Subjects:
Online Access:https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4336/11/1/11
Description
Summary:The Stable Fixtures problem (Irving and Scott (2007)) is a generalized matching model that nests the well-known Stable Roommates, Stable Marriage, and College Admissions problems as special cases. This paper extends a result of the Stable Roommates problem to demonstrate that a class of homophilic preferences with an appealing psychological interpretation is sufficient to ensure that starting from an arbitrary matching, a decentralized process of allowing the sequential matching of randomly chosen blocking pairs will converge to a pairwise-stable matching with probability one. Strategic implications of this class of preferences are examined and further possible generalizations and directions for future research are discussed.
ISSN:2073-4336