Efficient Dynamic Barter Exchange
Operations research(2017)
Abstract
We study dynamic matching policies in a stochastic marketplace for barter, with agents arriving over time. Each agent is endowed with an item and is interested in an item possessed by another agent homogeneously with probability p, independently for all pairs of agents. Three settings are considered with respect to the types of allowed exchanges: (a) only two-way cycles, in which two agents swap items, (b) two-way or three-way cycles, (c) (unbounded) chains initiated by an agent who provides an item but expects nothing in return. We consider the average waiting time as a measure of efficiency and find that the cost outweighs the benefit from waiting to thicken the market. In particular, in each of the above settings, a policy that conducts exchanges in a greedy fashion is near optimal. Further, for small p, we find that allowing three-way cycles greatly reduces the waiting time over just two-way cycles, and conducting exchanges through a chain further reduces the waiting time significantly. Thus, a centralized planner can achieve the smallest waiting times by using a greedy policy, and by facilitating three-way cycles and chains, if possible. The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/opre.2017.1644 .
MoreTranslated text
Key words
barter,matching,market design,random graphs,dynamics,kidney exchange,platform,control policy
AI Read Science
Must-Reading Tree
Example
![](https://originalfileserver.aminer.cn/sys/aminer/pubs/mrt_preview.jpeg)
Generate MRT to find the research sequence of this paper
Chat Paper
Summary is being generated by the instructions you defined