Redesigning the Israeli Medical Internship Match

28 Pages Posted: 7 May 2015

See all articles by Noga Alon

Noga Alon

Tel Aviv University

Slava Bronfman

Bar-Ilan University

Avinatan Hassidim

Bar Ilan university, Israel

Assaf Romm

Hebrew University of Jerusalem - Department of Economics; Stanford University

Date Written: May 7, 2015

Abstract

The final step in getting an Israeli M.D. is performing a year-long internship in one of the hospitals in Israel. Internships are decided upon by a lottery, which is known as "The Internship Lottery''. In 2014 we redesigned the lottery, replacing it with a more efficient one. This paper presents the market, the redesign process and the new mechanism which is now in use. There are two main lessons that we have learned from this market. The first is the "Do No Harm'' principle, which states that (almost) all participants should prefer the new mechanism to the old one. The second is that new approaches need to be used when dealing with two-body problems in object assignment. We focus on the second lesson, and study two-body problems in the context of the assignment problem. We show that decomposing stochastic assignment matrices to deterministic allocations is NP-hard in the presence of couples, and present a polynomial time algorithm with the optimal worst case guarantee. We also study the performance of our algorithm on real-world and on simulated data.

Suggested Citation

Alon, Noga and Bronfman, Slava and Hassidim, Avinatan and Romm, Assaf, Redesigning the Israeli Medical Internship Match (May 7, 2015). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2603546 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2603546

Noga Alon

Tel Aviv University ( email )

Ramat Aviv
Tel-Aviv, 6997801
Israel

Slava Bronfman

Bar-Ilan University ( email )

Ramat Gan
Ramat Gan, 52900
Israel

Avinatan Hassidim

Bar Ilan university, Israel ( email )

Israel

Assaf Romm (Contact Author)

Hebrew University of Jerusalem - Department of Economics ( email )

Mount Scopus
Jerusalem, 91905
Israel

Stanford University ( email )

Stanford, CA 94305
United States

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