Template-type: ReDif-Paper 1.0
Author-Name: Klaus, Bettina 
Author-Name: Klijn, Flip 
Author-workplace-name: METEOR
Title: Smith and Rawls Share a Room: Stability and Medians
Abstract: We consider one-to-one, one-sided matching (roommate) problems in which agents can either be matched as pairs or remain single. We introduce a so-called bi-choice graph for each pair of stable matchings and characterize its structure. Exploiting this structure we obtain as a corollary the “lonely wolf” theorem and a decomposability result. The latter result together with transitivity of blocking leads to an elementary proof of the so-called stable median matching theorem, showing how the often incompatible concepts of stability (represented by the political economist Adam Smith) and fairness (represented by the political philosopher John Rawls) can be reconciled for roommate problems. Finally, we extend our results to two-sided matching problems.
Keywords: Economics (Jel: A)
Series: Research Memoranda
Creation-Date: 2008
Number: 009
File-URL: http://arnop.unimaas.nl/show.cgi?fid=11790
File-Format: application/pdf
File-Size: 246284
Handle: RePEc:unm:umamet:2008009