The scholarship assignment problem (Q700089)

This paper discusses a problem similar to the stable marriage problem. There are \(n\) graduate students and \(n\) professors. Each student will be assigned a scholarship and the scholarships are ranked by their prestige. The socially optimal outcome which is known to all the professors, is that the rank one (the most prestigious one) is given to the best student, rank 2 scholarship, to the next best and so on. However each professor wants the rank one scholarship to go to a particular student and the remaining, according to the socially optimal outcome. The problem of finding a mechanism that ensures that in the equilibrium the socially optimal outcome is obtained for all the scholarships is discussed in this paper.