{"id":12980,"date":"2026-11-03T16:23:08","date_gmt":"2026-11-03T07:23:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.waseda.jp\/fpse\/winpec\/?p=12980"},"modified":"2026-11-03T16:24:24","modified_gmt":"2026-11-03T07:24:24","slug":"ueda-k-watanabe-k-restaurant-prices-measuring-service-inflation-from-scanner-data-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.waseda.jp\/fpse\/winpec\/news\/2026\/11\/03\/12980\/","title":{"rendered":"Elena Molis,<strong> R\u00f3bert F. Veszteg<br><br><strong>Experimental results on the roommate problem"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1007\/s00355-026-01667-5\">Elena Molis, R\u00f3bert F. Veszteg (June 2026). Experimental results on the roommate problem. <em>Social Choice and Welfare.<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n<p><strong>\u89e3\u8aac\/Abstract<br \/>\n<\/strong><strong data-olk-copy-source=\"MessageBody\">Where Do Partner-Search Markets End Up? Lab Evidence on the Roommate Problem<br \/>\n<\/strong>Many everyday situations require people to form pairs from a single group: students choosing roommates, colleagues teaming up on a project, players picking doubles partners. Economists call this the \u201croommate problem,\u201d and it is surprisingly hard to solve in theory, because it may have no \u201cstable\u201d outcome at all. In a stable outcome, no two people would both rather leave their current partners for each other. Pairs who would, called blocking pairs, are the main source of instability.<\/p>\n<p>Because stability cannot be guaranteed, economists have proposed several alternative theoretical solutions. Our research tests these solutions in laboratory experiments.<\/p>\n<p>We focus on decentralized interaction, that is, where a market ends up when people interact freely and are allowed to look for partners on their own. Our experiments show that such decentralized markets move toward eliminating blocking pairs and increasing aggregate earnings, a common proxy for efficiency. More than 80% of new partnerships were formed by blocking pairs, so both people gained from the switch, and markets captured about 92% of the highest possible total earnings.<\/p>\n<p>Among the theoretical candidates for solutions, the \u201cabsorbing set\u201d performed best. It is a collection of outcomes that a market can move among but never escape, and 93% of our markets ended in it. However, not all outcomes inside the theoretical absorbing set were equally likely to arise in the laboratory. Outcomes with an additional property called P-stability attracted markets most strongly. They are formed by leaving out one person from each \u201ccycle\u201d of conflicting preferences, the very feature that rules out stability. P-stability thus sharpens the predictions of absorbing sets.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Elena Molis, R\u00f3bert F. Veszteg (June 2026). Experimental results on the roommate problem. Social Choice and We [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":12903,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[102,66,101,32],"class_list":["post-12980","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-general-en","tag-research-en","tag-general","tag-research"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.waseda.jp\/fpse\/winpec\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12980","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.waseda.jp\/fpse\/winpec\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.waseda.jp\/fpse\/winpec\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.waseda.jp\/fpse\/winpec\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.waseda.jp\/fpse\/winpec\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12980"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.waseda.jp\/fpse\/winpec\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12980\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12986,"href":"https:\/\/www.waseda.jp\/fpse\/winpec\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12980\/revisions\/12986"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.waseda.jp\/fpse\/winpec\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12903"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.waseda.jp\/fpse\/winpec\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12980"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.waseda.jp\/fpse\/winpec\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12980"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.waseda.jp\/fpse\/winpec\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12980"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}