"In matching markets, where 'sellers' and 'buyers' must choose each other, some surprising rules govern a vast array of our activities -- both mundane and life-changing -- where money has little or no role in who gets what. From applying for a job to asking someone out on a date, or getting your child into the best school or university, matching plays a crucial and invisible part. It accounts for some of the biggest technological successes of the decade, like Uber and Airbnb, and can even be the gatekeeper of life itself, guiding how desperately ill patients receive scarce organs for transplants. Nobel Prize-winner Al Roth is one of the world's leading experts on matching markets. He even designed several of them, including the system that increases the number of kidney transplants by better matching donors to patients. In Who Gets What and Why, his life's work provides an x-ray of the market designs you don't see. It shows how to recognize a good match and make smarter, more confident decisions"--Jacket

Two-sided matching provides a model of search processes such as those between firms and workers in labor markets or between buyers and sellers in auctions. This book gives a comprehensive account of recent results concerning the game-theoretic analysis of two-sided matching. The focus of the book is on the stability of outcomes, on the incentives that different rules of organization give to agents, and on the constraints that these incentives impose on the ways such markets can be organized. The results for this wide range of related models and matching situations help clarify which conclusions depend on particular modeling assumptions and market conditions, and which are robust over a wide range of conditions. 'This book chronicles one of the outstanding success stories of the theory of games, a story in which the authors have played a major role: the theory and practice of matching markets … The authors are to be warmly congratulated for this fine piece of work, which is quite unique in the game-theoretic literature.' From the Foreword by Robert Aumann