A Direct Proof of the Short-Side Advantage in Random Matching Markets

TL;DR

This paper provides a direct proof of the short-side advantage in random matching markets, explaining why the side with fewer participants tends to have better match outcomes, using the doctor-proposal deferred-acceptance algorithm.

Contribution

It offers the first direct proof of the short-side advantage, clarifying the underlying reasons within the doctor-proposal deferred-acceptance framework.

Findings

Doctors have expected rank of order log n in balanced markets.

Hospitals have expected rank of order n / log n in balanced markets.

The short-side advantage is explicitly demonstrated through the direct analysis.

Abstract

We study the stable matching problem under the random matching model where the preferences of the doctors and hospitals are sampled uniformly and independently at random. In a balanced market with $n$ doctors and $n$ hospitals, the doctor-proposal deferred-acceptance algorithm gives doctors an expected rank of order $\log n$ for their partners and hospitals an expected rank of order $\frac{n}{\log n}$ for their partners. This situation is reversed in an unbalanced market with $n+1$ doctors and $n$ hospitals, a phenomenon known as the short-side advantage. The current proofs of this fact are indirect, counter-intuitively being based upon analyzing the hospital-proposal deferred-acceptance algorithm. In this paper we provide a direct proof of the short-side advantage, explicitly analyzing the doctor-proposal deferred-acceptance algorithm. Our proof sheds light on how and why the phenomenon arises.