The Redesign of the Matching Market for American Physicians: Some Engineering Aspects of Economic Design

Alvin Roth () and Elliott Peranson

No 6963, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: We report on the design of the new clearinghouse adopted by the National Resident Matching Program, which annually fills approximately 20,000 jobs for new physicians in the United States. Because that market exhibits many complementarities between applicants and between positions, the theory of simple matching markets does not apply directly. However, computational experiments reveal that the theory provides a good approximation, and furthermore the set of stable matchings, and the opportunities for strategic manipulation, are surprisingly small. A new kind of core convergence' result is presented to explain this; the fact that each applicant can interview for only a small fraction of available positions is important. We also describe in detail engineering aspects of the design process.

New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea and nep-mic
Date: Written 1999-02
Note: HE LS
View list of references View citations in EconPapers

Published as American Economic Review, Vol. 89, no. 4 (September 1999): 748-780.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w6963.pdf (application/pdf)
Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html.

Related works:
Journal Article: The Redesign of the Matching Market for American Physicians: Some Engineering Aspects of Economic Design (1999)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w6963
The price is Paper copy available by mail.

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc
Address: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by ().