Matching with Contracts: Slot-specific Preferences in Academic Communities

Science can nowadays be considered as a collective action, not only in theoretical sense, but also in terms of practical cooperation both on a local and global level. Moreover, by the growth of joint publication rates we can conclude that combined effort is essential for the path of science. Assuming that cooperation is essential we also have to highlight that team composition also affects academic productivity. Moreover universities are interested in hiring the most productive scientists and creating an environment to stimulate scholars to provide impactful research in order to improve their reputation and attract students and funds . In this sense the following research is dedicated to investigating mechanisms of hiring productive scholars and providing them a cooperative environment. In order to analyze the potential optimal cooperation between universities and different types of scholars we will utilize matching with contracts framework and more precisely matching with slot-specific priorities. Our results are based on the idea that the effect of cooperation between scholars leads to inconsistent universities' preferences over the set of scholars, since they depend on each other. We demonstrate that for these preferences bilateral substitutability condition does not hold and possible solutions can be obtained by two possible approaches. First, universities can utilize a sequential maximization method, which strongly depends on the available information. Second they can unify preferences to introduce consistency by utilizing social choice models approach, and then achieve a stable allocation utilizing cumulative offer process. Both of these solutions are consistent with empirics and provide stable and strategy-proof results.