An Experimental Study of Decentralized Matching

We present an experimental study of decentralized one-to-one matching markets, such as labor or marriage markets. In our experiments, subjects are informed of everyone’s preferences and can make arbitrary non-binding match offers that are realized only when a certain period of market inactivity has elapsed. We find three main results. First, stable matches are the prevalent outcome. Second, in markets with multiple stable matches, the median stable match is selected most frequently. Third, the cardinal representation of ordinal preferences substantially impacts which stable match gets selected. Furthermore, the endogenous dynamic paths that lead to stability exhibit several persistent features.