arXiv subjects

Yoshihiro Takenami

Publications and source records attributed to Yoshihiro Takenami.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Daycare Matching with Siblings: Social Implementation and Welfare Evaluation

In centralized matching markets, agents may value joint assignment, as with siblings or couples. Standard preference estimation ignores such complementarities, complicating welfare analysis of priority rules for paired assignment. We develop an empirical framework incorporating these preferences and apply it to Japanese daycare assignment. Families face both additional commuting distance and a fixed disutility from split assignment. We estimate the latter at 4.61 commuting-kilometer equivalents. Our fixed-report counterfactual estimates that the reform increased mean welfare by 0.032 kilometer-equivalent units. Ignoring sibling complementarity understates welfare gains for households applying simultaneously for multiple children by about 27%.

econ.GN↗

arXiv2024

Stable Matchings in Practice: A Constraint Programming Approach

We study a practical two-sided matching problem of allocating children to daycare centers, which has significant social implications. We are cooperating with several municipalities in Japan and our goal is to devise a reliable and trustworthy clearing algorithm to deal with the problem. In this paper, we describe the design of our new algorithm that minimizes the number of unmatched children while ensuring stability. We evaluate our algorithm using real-life data sets, and experimental results demonstrate that our algorithm surpasses the commercial software that currently dominates the market in terms of both the number of matched children and the number of blocking coalitions (measuring stability). Our findings have been reported to local governments, and some are considering adopting our proposed algorithm in the near future, instead of the existing solution. Moreover, our model and algorithm have broader applicability to other important matching markets, such as hospital-doctor matching with couples and school choice with siblings.

cs.GT↗

arXiv2022

Daycare Matching in Japan: Transfers and Siblings

In this paper, we study a daycare matching problem in Japan and report the design and implementation of a new centralized algorithm, which is going to be deployed in one municipality in the Tokyo metropolis. There are two features that make this market different from the classical hospital-doctor matching problem: i) some children are initially enrolled and prefer to be transferred to other daycare centers; ii) one family may be associated with two or more children and is allowed to submit preferences over combinations of daycare centers. We revisit some well-studied properties including individual rationality, non-wastefulness, as well as stability, and generalize them to this new setting. We design an algorithm based on integer programming (IP) that captures these properties and conduct experiments on five real-life data sets provided by three municipalities. Experimental results show that i) our algorithm performs at least as well as currently used methods in terms of numbers of matched children and blocking coalition; ii) we can find a stable outcome for all instances, although the existence of such an outcome is not guaranteed in theory.

cs.GT↗