Design of social matching algorithms for distributed and autonomous environments

The authors discuss the design of distributed and autonomous algorithms for producing social matching such as dancing pairs from groups of boys and girls, roommates for a boy dormitory, and job placement in the employment market in message-exchange network environments. The matching process must preserve personal privacy, stability of matching, preference-based autonomous behavior, and conformability of the whole model to social norms. Such constraints are shown to give rise to quite interesting design problems and algorithms, which are contrasted with imperative computer algorithms