Nobel prizes in matchmaking

Believe it or not, there have been two Nobel Prizes awarded for matchmaking. Technically they were Sveriges Riksbank Prizes in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, but everyone calls them Nobel Prizes in Economics.

The Nash Equilibrium

The first went to John Forbes Nash, the guy played by Russell Crowe in A Beautiful Mind. He was awarded the prize in 1994 for his work on the Nash equilibrium.

A Nash equilibrium describes a state in a game that is stable because nobody can benefit by changing their strategy. It has applications in fields such as arms treaties, technical standards, and environmental and banking regulations.

It also predicts when a romantic relationship is likely to be stable: when neither party can do better.

This could be because a party's current partner is the best one in existence, or (more likely) because better options are already spoken for or not interested. It also assumes that staying with the current partner is better than being single. But whatever the reason, the best strategy for both parties is to stick together.

The stable marriage problem

The second Nobel prize, for the Gale-Shapley algorithm, went to Lloyd Shapley and Alvin Roth in 2012 (David Gale passed away in 2008).

This algorithm finds an optimal solution to the stable marriage problem, meaning that for a group of men and women with known preferences, all parties can be assigned to a stable Nash equilibrium relationship. It was famously used in 1995 to match medical graduates with hospitals.

Although it relies on all parties being able to rank their options — not practical for dating in a city with millions of people — it's nice to know that, in theory at least, you could put everyone into their best possible relationship.

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