Decision on SIG-2026-0268

[MSOM Conference]

08-May-2026

Re: SIG-2026-0268, "Searching for Top Residency Talents in Competitive Job Markets: Analyzing the competitive impact of information technologies"

SIG Day Decision: Reject

Dear Author (this is to ensure anonymity):

We received many excellent submissions for the Healthcare Operations Management SIG-Day Conference. Unfortunately, we were unable to accept all of them to be included in the program, and we are sorry to say that your paper was not accepted to the SIG-Day conference.

If you also submitted an extended abstract of your paper to the main MSOM Conference, a decision on that submission will come separately.


Sincerely,

Healthcare Operations;SIG Co-Chairs

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Referee: 1
Please summarize the paper briefly. - Rev: Motivated by the U.S. medical residency match, this paper studies a model in which two employers face a common pool of applicants. Each applicant has a private quality, and employers only observe imperfect signals of quality distorted by noise. Based only on these imprecise signals, each employer selects a certain number of applicants to interview. The true qualities are revealed after the interviews, and employers issue offers accordingly. Each employer also has a private employer preference, based on which it decides which offer to accept.

The key implications are: If the two employers are completely symmetric, increasing one employer’s interview capacity or improving its ex ante screening precision benefits the other employer. If all applicants prefer one employer over the other, increasing the less preferred employer’s interview capacity or improving its ex ante screening accuracy benefits itself without affecting the more preferred employer.

Referee: 2
Please summarize the paper briefly. - Rev: This paper studies congestion and competition in interview-gated centralized matching markets, motivated by the NRMP. Programs choose interview capacity and screening precision, and final matches are determined via a deferred acceptance (DA) mechanism.

The paper shows that under symmetric demand, unilateral improvements in capacity or precision generate positive spillovers to competing programs. Under asymmetric demand, the preferred program’s outcome is invariant to rivals’ actions, while the less-preferred program can improve outcomes through capacity expansion, improved precision, and a top-censoring strategy.

The main contribution is to show how operational screening decisions interact with the DA mechanism to generate competitive externalities. In particular, the non-monotonicity result (Theorem 6) provides the paper’s key insight.-


Referee: 1

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Referee: 2

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