Matching With (Branch-of-Choice) Contracts at the United States Military Academy
研究了美国军事学院学员通过延长服役期来提升分支优先级的匹配问题，发现现有机制不满足公平稳定等性质，而代理最优稳定机制能改善学员和军队的福利。
Branch selection is a key decision in a cadet's military career. Cadets at USMA can increase their branch priorities at a fraction of slots by extending their service agreement. This real-life matching problem fills an important gap in the market design literature, providing strong empirical legitimacy to a series of elegant theoretical works on matching with contracts. Although priorities fail a key substitutes condition, the agent-optimal stable mechanism is well defined, and in contrast to the current USMA mechanism it is fair, stable, strategy-proof, and respects improvements in cadet priorities. Adoption of this mechanism benefits cadets and the Army. This new application shows that the matching with contracts model is practically relevant beyond traditional domains that satisfy the substitutes condition.