The Short-Side Advantage in Random Matching Markets

Abstract

A breakthrough of Ashlagi, Kanoria, and Leshno [AKL17] found that imbalance in the number of agents on either side of a random matching market has a profound effect on the market's expected characteristics. Specifically, across all stable matchings, the "long side" (i.e. the side with a greater number of agents) receives significantly worse matches in expectation than the short side. Intuitively, this occurs because an agent on the long side is essentially unneeded to create a stable matching -- a matching could form almost as easily without them. Thus, an agent on the long side has very little market power, and must settle for a match which is not much better than a random assignment. We provide a new and simpler proof for a result of [AKL17] which formalizes this intuition.