We analyze the evolution on the design of a policy measure promoted by the Spanish
Government: the Ramón y Cajal Program. In the first calls of the Program, an eligibility
requirement for a researcher was a preacceptance from at least one Spanish research institution.
This requirement was removed in the fourth call. We model the recruiting process as a twosided
matching model to find the reason for the new design. We model the situation as if
research centers decided by majority to play either the old or the new mechanism. Our results
prove that in a repeated game and assuming that research personnel is scarce, even endogamic
centers will prefer the new mechanism after a finite number of calls. We also analyze
application data for the first five calls, finding empirical support to our assumptions and
theoretical findings