Two-Sided Matching with Resource-Regional Caps

We study two-sided many-to-one matching problems under a novel type of distributional constraints, resource-regional caps. In the context of college admissions, under resource-regional caps, an admitted student may be provided with a unit of some resource through a college, which belongs to a region possessing some amount of this resource. A student may be admitted to a college with at most one unit of any resource, i.e., all resources are close substitutes, e.g., dorms on the campus, dorms outside the campus, subsidies for renting a room, etc. The core feature of our model is that students are allowed to be admitted without any resource, which breaks heredity property of previously studied models with regions. It is well known that a stable matching may not exist under markets with regional constraints. Thus, we focus on three weakened versions of stability that restore existence under resource-regional caps: envyfreeness plus resource-efficiency, non-wastefulness, and novel direct-envy stability. For each version of stability we design corresponding matching mechanism(s). Finally, we compare stability performances of constructed mechanisms on an exhaustive collection of synthetic markets, and conclude that the most sophisticated direct-envy stable mechanism is the go-to mechanism for maximal stability of the resulting matching under resource-regional caps.