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Matching Market

Alvin Roth's term for a market where the challenge is not setting a price that clears supply and demand but pairing participants correctly under constraints — compatibility, preference, capacity — that a simple price mechanism cannot capture or is not permitted to use. Kidney exchange chains and strategy-proof school-assignment algorithms are both matching markets, solving structurally identical problems in different domains.

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Vocabulary from all courses. Terms are cross-referenced to show where each concept appears.