Matching With Couples: Stability And Incentives In Large Markets

Accommodating couples has been a longstanding issue in the design of centralized labor market clearinghouses for doctors and psychologists, because couples view pairs of jobs as complements. A stable matching may not exist when couples are present. The authors find conditions under which a stable matching exists with high probability in large markets. They present a mechanism that finds a stable matching with high probability, and which makes truth-telling by all participants an approximate equilibrium. They relate these theoretical results to the job market for psychologists, in which stable matching's exist for all years of the data, despite the presence of couples.