Article Title: Opinion | The Gale-Shapley algorithm and the future of work

Article Summary

The main point of the article is that with millennials becoming a dominant part of the workforce, workers will exhibit shifting preferences towards an improved work-life balance with a heightened focus on individual advancement, and close relationships, including with supervisors.The World Economic Forum ‘Future of Jobs Report 2018’ presents a picture of a world gearing up for its fourth industrial revolution. The fourth revolution will be powered by technology breakthroughs in fields such as artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, 3-D printing, and energy storage. The article further predicts the changes that will take place in the workplace, and this change in workplaces will be accompanied by the changing mindset of the worker.

The second part poses a question and then answers it. The question is that does game theory offer any tools that could help with the changing contours of the job market? The answer is: Think of the job market as a polygamous or polyandrous marriage game, with one employer hiring multiple workers. The challenge is to assign workers to employers such that no worker-employer pair likes each other more than the employer or worker with whom they are paired. With such an assignment, there would be no attrition.In the world we live in, such an algorithm is not acceptable to companies. The solution would be to divide the job market into an external job market, which represents the interface of the company with potential employees, and an internal job market, which represents the movement of workers to new roles within the company. The conclusion us that in this situation, it may not be difficult to convince companies as well as competition regulators that there is a better way, and that the Gale-Shapley algorithm offers useful tips for designing the labour markets of the future.

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Words to learn from this Article:

Polygamous: typically having more than one mate.

Stratospheric: extremely high.

Polyandry: It is a form of polygamy in which a woman takes two or more husbands at the same time. Poach: take or acquire in an unfair or clandestine way.

Algorithm: a process or set of rules to be followed in calculations or other problem-solving operations, especially by a computer

To gravitate: be influenced or drawn