DYNAMIC MATCHING IN CAMPUS PLACEMENTS: THE BENEFITS AND AFFORDABILITY OF THE DREAM OPTION

Campus placement is an important criterion for a student seeking admission into a college in India. To maximise the number of placements, colleges typically allow a student to appear for interviews only until he/she obtains a job offer. We refer to this mechanism as company-driven random serial dictatorship (CRSD). In CRSD, the students face the following dilemma: Whether to appear for an interview in the current slot or wait for a preferable company that is yet to arrive. An additional challenge is that every company wishes to come on campus as early as possible to recruit the best students. In this paper, we propose a new approach to improving student outcomes - the provision of the dream option that allows a student with a job offer to participate in the placement process again. We analyse the impact of the dream option mechanism for three different degrees of competition in the job market and compare it with the CRSD. We then compare both the mechanisms under three different student preference structures for the following measures: stability, student happiness, rank efficiency, and companies’ dissatisfaction. Our analysis shows that the dream option always improves stability; however, surprisingly, it does not always improve student happiness and rank efficiency. Nevertheless, imposing a particular structure on student preferences, namely the sequential preference condition, improves both student happiness and rank efficiency. Our analysis recommends when to use the dream option and when not to use it.