The Marriage Pact is an annual matchmaking activity that takes place on American college campuses, by which students fill out compatibility surveys in order to find a partner among fellow participants, who they agree will be their backup "safety" spouse in the future in case they are then unmarried.
Unlike marketplaces, where problems are solved by establishing pricing mechanisms and then allowing the participants to find optimal solutions among themselves, allocation problems happen when pricing is impractical or undesirable, such as assigning donated organs to surgery patients, students to schools, or refugees to host cities.
[4] In 1962, David Gale and Lloyd Shapley proved that one or more solutions could always be found for an equal number of men and women under idealized assumptions that people's preferences are known, stable, rankable, they are honest about them, and couples are binary and will remain indefinitely in committed heterosexual marriages.
[4] The project soon spread to other campuses in subsequent years, and McGregor launched a company to work full-time to support it.
In 2020, a number of college administrations, including those at Vanderbilt and Tufts, sponsored the project as a way of diverting students during the COVID-19 pandemic.