One-Sided Matching with Permission

Abstract

Classical one-sided matching assumes participants in the matching market are of a fixed size, each with an initial endowment and can exchange with others. In this paper, we consider a more dynamic and challenging setting where only a few participants are initially in the market, while the others need their invitation/permission to join in. However, the invitation does not always occur naturally and thus requires incentives. If we simply apply Top Trading Cycle, a classic solution for traditional matching, invitees may compete with their inviters in the matching and therefore they are reluctant to invite others. To combat this, we propose a new solution to protect inviters which guarantees that inviting all their friends is a dominant strategy for all participants. This solution novelly utilizes participants' invitations, which is not a simple extension of any existing solutions. We demonstrate its advantages in terms of participants' satisfaction by simulations and compare it with other existing solutions