Redesigning the Israeli Psychology Master's Match

Abstract

We review the process of redesigning the Israeli Psychology Masters Match (IPMM), with special attention given to the fellowships granted by the departments and the interplay between different programs within the same department. These features make the IPMM a two-sided matching with contracts market. In this market choice functions are not substitutable (or even unilateral substitutable), but do have substitutable completions. We show that since (generally speaking) students care more about the program they attend than about the terms of the contract, and despite the fact that lists are short and programs are over-demanded, the market has a large core in the sense that many agents are assigned different contracts in different stable matchings. Finally, we show that under a different preference structure, which we observe in data from the Hungarian college admissions process, the core is large in the sense that the composition of agents varies between different stable matchings.