Open Matchmaking
Matchmaking is the particular case of a market where each of both potential partners is sensitive to the details of the other and has to review the details of many offers before making a choice.
Apart from the usual interpretation of the word as matching for love or marriage, the other important example is the job market.
See Wikipedia Search theory
The assessment problem
The selection of possible partners requires a procedure by which every artner assesses the possible partners'details and quantifies his interest for each of them.
There are 4 categories of criteria, from the easiest to the hardest to review.
- Doubly formal criteria: where both the data and the other's preferences over the possible values of this data can be expressed by filling standard forms, and where the selection and goodness measure can be processed by computer
- Human parameter, formal review: in job market, it is when candidates have to pass a test whose result will be automatically processed by the recruiters
- Formal parameter, human review: in online dating, one's picture is a sort of parameter that enters the database but each potential partner has to make a human reviewing effort to assess it.
- Unformulable criteria: computers are of no help here, people have to meet each other or anyway interact before taking any decision.
Another problem is the problem of trust for the reliability of parameters entered in database.
The final choice problem
In matchmaking problems, the operation of final choice of a partner can't be trivial, because if 2 people are choosing the same partner then this partner will still have to choose between them; if he expressed his preference in advance then the second prefered one would still have a chance if the first made another choice. There are two possible paradigms to handle this problem:
- The static paradigm, where the full set of data is entered at once to the input, then all matches are fixed at once at the output. See the [stable marriage problem] for a theoretical study
- The dynamical paradigm, where people have the option of waiting in case a better opportunity would come later.
See Wikipedia Search theory