Project number: LP2021-2/2021

Matching problems under preferences have been studied extensively by economists, game theorists, computer scientists and mathematicians since the seminal paper by Gale and Shapley appeared in 1962. The main motivation for the research in this area is coming from the applications, the centralised matching schemes, that have been established since 1952 to allocate residents to hospitals, students to schools/universities/courses, and kidneys to patients, just to mention a few examples. The scientists in this field not only study the theoretical questions arising in the applications, but often initiate new applications and help to design new market mechanisms or redesign existing schemes. This scientific work has been recognised with the 2012 and 2020 Nobel memorial award in economics given to Roth and Shapley, and to Milgrom and Wilson for their work on matching markets and auctions, respectively.
In our proposed project we would like to conduct a multidisciplinary research focusing on the
computational, game-theoretical, and economic aspects of mechanism design in matching markets. The novelty of our approach is that we will study the complex systems through agent-based models and simulations, where besides solving various optimisation problems we take the expected behaviour of the agents into account and we also analyse the outcomes with respect to the estimated preferences and stated objectives of the participants. This methodology can be seen as machine learning in multiagents systems, but our context requires the expertise of education, health, energy and experimental economists as well for studying allocation programmes in school choice, college admission, course allocation, kidney exchanges, and auctions in energy markets, respectively. The computer simulations will be conducted on real and generated data of centralised matching programmes, and we will make our assumptions regarding the agents’ behaviour based on field and laboratory experiments. Besides the scientific research, we will be involved in the implementation of practical applications and their evaluation, especially in the Hungarian and European policy context.