Department of Economics Working Paper Series Marriage Matching and Intercorrelation of Preferences

Men’s and women’s preferences are intercorrelated to the extent that men rank highly those women who rank them highly. Intercorrelation plays an important but overlooked role in determining outcomes of matching mechanisms. We study via simulation the effect of intercorrelated preferences on men’s and women’s ag-gregate satisfaction with the outcome of the Gale-Shapley matching mechanism. We conclude with an application of our results to the student admission matching problem