College Admissions and the Stability of Marriage

David Gale, Lloyd S. Shapley

Expert InsightsPublished 1961

A procedure for assigning applicants to colleges which removes all uncertainties and, assuming there are enough applicants, assigns to each college precisely its quota. To determine the existence of stable assignments, the authors discuss whether it is possible, for any pattern of preferences, to find a stable set of marriages. It is shown that the extension of the "deferred acceptance" procedure to the problem of college admission yields not only a stable but an optimal assignment of applicants.

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Document Details

  • Availability: Web Only
  • Year: 1961
  • Pages: 18
  • Document Number: P-2240

Citation

Chicago Manual of Style

Gale, David and Lloyd S. Shapley, College Admissions and the Stability of Marriage. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 1961. https://www.rand.org/pubs/papers/P2240.html.
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