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College Admissions and the Stability of Marriage: Read Nobel Prize Winner Lloyd Shapley's Early Work on Deferred Acceptance Algorithms

College Admissions and the Stability of Marriage: Read Nobel Prize Winner Lloyd Shapley's Early Work on Deferred Acceptance Algorithms

Original Cover of the January 1962 Issue of <em>The American Mathematical Monthly</em>

The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2012 was awarded jointly to economist Alvin E. Roth (Harvard University) and mathematician Lloyd S. Shapley (University of California, Los Angeles) for their work on market design and matching theory, which relate to how people and companies find and select one another in everything from marriage to school choice to jobs to organ donations.

According to the Nobel Prize offical press release, "The prize rewards two scholars who have answered these questions on a journey from abstract theory on stable allocations to practical design of market institutions."

Shapley first worked on the theoretical framework for analyzing resource allocation in a paper co-authored with David Gale. In the paper, titled ’College Admissions and the Stability of Marriage", they devised the deferred acceptance algorithm for finding a stable matching.

This article was published in the January 1962 issue of The American Mathematical Monthly and, to this day, is one of the journal's most frequently cited articles.

Read the full article (pdf).

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