From Preference to Reciprocity: Decentralized Matching with Empirically Grounded LLM-agent Based Modeling

Wangxuan Fan, Xiaoyu Nie, Zhoutian Shi, Xiangcheng Meng, Shipei Zeng +3

Bipartite matching is a fundamental problem in game theory and market design. Classical approaches such as Gale--Shapley assume complete preferences and centralized computation, whereas many real-world matching processes are decentralized, asynchronous, and shaped by sequential interaction under limited information. We propose a dynamic bipartite matching framework that combines large language model (LLM) agents with contextual bandits. In a simulated Chinese marriage market, economically grounded LLM agents evaluate locally encountered candidates, while agent-specific Logistic-UCB models learn reciprocal acceptance from realized proposal outcomes. The mechanism therefore separates two decisions---\emph{whom do I like?} and \emph{who is likely to like me back?}---without requiring ex ante market-wide preference rankings. We first validate LLM-induced mate preferences against the empirical conditional-logit reference across multiple LLM backbones. In the $50\times50$ matching experiment, Bandit-UCB achieves the highest mean mutual welfare (56.01 versus 54.87 for Gale--Shapley), a smaller gender rank gap than the classical baselines, and the fewest blocking pairs among the LLM-ABM…