Partner Search Heuristics in the Lab: Stability of Matchings Under Various Preference Structures

Abstract

When agents search for partners, the outcome is a matching. K. Eriksson and O. Häggström (2008) defined a measure of instability of matchings and proved that under a certain partner search heuristic, outcomes are likely to have low instability. They also showed that with regards to stability, the preference structure known as common preferences lie somewhere in between the extreme cases of homotypic and antithetical preferences. Following up on this theoretical work, we let human subjects search for a good partner in a computer game where preferences were set to be either common, homotypic, or antithetical. We find that total search effort and instability of the outcome vary in the predicted ways with the preference structure and the number of agents. A set of simulations show that these results are consistent with a model where agents use a simple search heuristic with a slight possibility of error.