Article ID: | iaor20083402 |
Country: | United States |
Volume: | 55 |
Issue: | 5 |
Start Page Number: | 921 |
End Page Number: | 931 |
Publication Date: | Sep 2007 |
Journal: | Operations Research |
Authors: | Eriksson Kimmo, Sjstrand Jonas, Strimling Pontus |
Keywords: | game theory |
In a two-sided version of the famous secretary problem, employers search for a secretary at the same time as secretaries search for an employer. Nobody accepts being put on hold, and nobody is willing to take part in more than N interviews. Preferences are independent, and agents seek to optimize the expected rank of the partner they obtain among the N potential partners. We find that in any subgame perfect equilibrium, the expected rank grows as the square root of N (whereas it tends to a constant in the original secretary problem). We also compute how much agents can gain by cooperation.