Gale-Shapley, used in this service, has the property that one side ("proposing" side) is guaranteed their most advantageous stable match while the other side is guaranteed their worst possible stable match.

I've never heard this discussed or mentioned as a drawback because it's Nobel Prize winning and "stable" is a shorthand for "fair". Even though there's many unique stable matches that each offer participants different utilities even if individual participants don't have incentives to change their pairing.

In practice, the more powerful party seems to be the proposing side, e.g. hospitals are the "proposing side" when using Gale-Shapeley to match w/ med school students and get their ideal students.

I wonder if anyone who works on dating apps knows if men or women are the preferred side? And is there any research on stable matching that ensures equity (or ideally arbitrary distribution of utility) between the two groups in their stable matches?

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Sniffnoy 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> I've never heard this discussed or mentioned as a drawback because it's Nobel Prize winning and "stable" is a shorthand for "fair".

You've never seen this discussed as a drawback? I've seen it mentioned quite a bit. For instance, it came up on the last big thread on this just the other day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49915825

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Scaevolus 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Given how women initiate most divorces, it's probably best to set it up so they are the proposing side.

But this isn't raw Gale-Shapley-- the participants aren't ranking all hundreds/thousands of others. In particular, the preference matrix is based on identical mutual compatibility scores, so there's a unique stable solution (not multiple stable ones!), and there's no "side" that benefits, since the solution is identical no matter who does the "proposing".

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brabel 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

If stats from dating websites are to be believed, all women tend to flock on all the same tiny percentage of men and ignore the rest. If women initiate, I’m afraid you will see only a few men getting any pairing. Men are likely to be less picky as we see in the wild.

	▲	stymaar 42 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> If stats from dating websites are to be believed, all women tend to flock on all the same tiny percentage of men and ignore the rest This is absolutely not an accidental phenomenon, this is the optimal outcome for dating apps, because that's the only way to prevent women from finding what they are looking for too quickly (and then leaving the app).
	▲	eru 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		For initiating, men are less picky. For marrying: I suspect they are about as picky?
	▲	ndr 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Monogamy is half the reason this is stable on paper.

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jjmarr 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> the preference matrix is based on identical mutual compatibility scores

Is that modeling the problem correctly? It seems pretty rare for two partners to have equal amounts of love for each other.

	▲	michaelt 3 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		If the goal is successful relationships, then probably? If I have 10/10 love for Halle Berry, and she has 4/10 love for my Jeff-Bezos-looking ass, it's the 4/10 that's going to dictate whether we live happily ever after. So our mutual compatibility is probably well below 10/10.
	▲	boxed 4 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I don't think you can measure love at all, and certainly not guess it based on some info you can type into your phone, so that's rules out before we even get started.

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SwtCyber 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

[dead]

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jmalicki 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Are there keywords to search for to read more? This is the first time I've heard about this! This is super interesting, what are a few well known other stable matches people deeper into this talk about?

	▲	jjmarr 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The set of stable matches for a given problem seems to be called the lattice of stable matching. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lattice_of_stable_matchings The problem is it's a lattice and not fully ordered. There are cases where there are two or more pairings that are worse for women and better for men, but we cannot determine which pairing is superior to the other overall.

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MisterMunchkin 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

That is how being the active party works.

“The active salesman got better sales than the person that just sat there and accepted offers? Outrageous!!!”

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4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[deleted]

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globular-toast 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Why is it a drawback, though? A stable match is a stable match. Do you lie awake at night wondering if your partner is really the best you could do?

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SwtCyber 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

[dead]