Two-sided matching in hierarchical organizations: an application for the assignment of military personnel

Abstract

Many large organizations rely on manual assignment processes, despite the theory of bounded rationality indicating that time and cognitive constraints would limit the quality of assignments. This research used participant experiments to explore the effect of information load on assignment quality: participants, motivated by induced value theory, performed the role of decision makers

and information load was identified by the number of personnel requiring assignment and the number of attributes to be considered. Results varied considerably between participants, despite a relatively homogenous group of participants and low information loads compared to what would be experienced in actual military assignment processes. Having analyzed the shortcomings of manual assignment processes, this research examined two-sided matching as the basis for a decision support system. It was demonstrated that two-sided matching could be used to assign personnel to positions in hierarchies. Multi-attribute utility functions were used to generate position preferences based on a variety of attributes, some relevant to the organization and others to its subordinate units. Computational experiments showed that assignments are responsive to the utility function weights, allowing decision makers to quickly examine various assignment sets under different conditions. The effects of preference list indifference on two-sided matching were also examined.