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D. Murali

How do couples fare in the job market? The ecomomic theory and the software to figure it out may be fuzzy but don't let that deter you.

If you are a binary thinker, like your computer, you should be able to think of everything as either `this' or `that'. All those in the world, for example, are either married or single, not counting the divorced and the living-togethers. Those married are either happy or not. And the unhappy ones are either economists or others. Much of their unhappiness comes probably from the strain to understand why things happen the way they happen. And one of the worries of economists is about the problems of couples looking jointly for jobs in the same labour market. This happens as a natural consequence of increasing numbers of women taking to higher education and seeking gainful employment.

Well, that's nothing uncommon in most offices, including the IT companies, where you can divide the entire workforce as the husband-wife group and the rest. What anguishes thinkers is not whether such working couples are able to cope with each other, or with their domestic chores; rather, they are obsessed with `stable matchings' in the `domain of responsive preferences' (DRP).

DRP is not `disaster recovery planning' but a metropolitan area where both the miya and the bibi would like to work, and if the market is able to get them the jobs they look for, there is a `matching'. `Stable', luckily, is a simpler word to understand, as most sane people as also the reasonably healthy and those married would appreciate.

In a working paper titled "Stable Matchings and Preferences of Couples or Some things couples always wanted to know about stable matchings (but were afraid to ask)", the authors Bettina Klaus and Flip Klijn of Barcelona make reference to a problem that was faced in the 1950s when the US labour market had to deal with thousands of medical school graduates seeking their first employment. A clearinghouse was therefore created in the 1950s and was called the National Resident Matching Program (NRMP).

However, two decades later, there was a growing number of couples in need of two positions in the same vicinity, and the clearinghouse could not service them. They left the centralised market and started to negotiate directly with hospitals, throwing the labour market to chaos as had existed before the 1950s.

It was only in the mid 1990s that the NRMP Board of Directors decided to design a new algorithm - something to salvage confidence in the system and also to deal with couples in an appropriate manner. Using computational simulations and analysing previous data, they could show that the new algorithm was effective. It was conceded, however, that even though theoretically a stable matching may not exist, the procedure never failed to converge to a stable matching, and "the incidence of examples with no stable matchings may be rare". The processing design of NRMP would admit all single candidates before any couples are admitted. This would reduce the number of times that the algorithm encounters cycles and so produced the fastest convergence.

If on top of your mind there is a question that you always wanted to ask but were afraid to ask, it could well be — `what are they trying to say?' But, as in bullfights in Barcelona, the end is not too smooth. The authors show that "even if preferences are responsive there are problems that do not arise for singles markets. Even though for couples in markets with responsive preferences the set of stable matchings is non empty, the lattice structure that this set has for singles markets does not carry over." Furthermore they demonstrate that "the new algorithm adopted by the NRMP to fill positions for physicians in the US may cycle, while in fact a stable matching does exist, and be prone to strategic manipulation if the members of a couple pretend to be single."

That is a lot of bloodshed. You ask an economist to find jobs for couples and he is suggesting that his software can handle singles so better you split and approach the market as singles. For the persistent reader who still wants to know how the logic works, there is a flowchart depicting the APCA, that is, short for `applicant proposing couples algorithm'. Moral of the story is very clear: Never try to help out couples till they become singles. Also, never sit pretty with an Intel inside when there are couples waiting outside.

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