Viral Bama Rush as a Matching Market
Source: https://www.npr.org/2022/10/07/1127543123/how-sorority-rush-is-a-matching-market
Sororities are part of what’s known as “Greek life” and they are social organizations at various university campuses. According to an article published in 2012, at Cornell, there’s around ⅓ undergraduate students in Greek life, with about 50 Greek life organizations. Similarly, the University of Alabama has around 35% of involved undergrads and around 68 Greek life organizations. I mention University of Alabama because many people are familiar with Greek life because they got a peek into the lives of sorority members’ school’s rush week from Bama Rush videos going viral on Tiktok. From these Tiktoks, there are discussions about the history of Greek life, including hazing, elitism, social hierarchies, racism, sexism, and misogyny. However, I want to explore more into the economics behind Greek life, using the University of Alabama as an example.
For Bama Rush sorority recruitment, two of their later timeline of events are Preference Day and Bid Day. Both of these events allude to the concept of matching markets. Preference day is where the Prospective New Members (PNM) meet to rank their most to least favorite sororities they would accept a bid from. After, there is a process of bid matching, where the sororities will rank you. The end outcome would be the matchings created from these two rankings. This process is similar to matching markets where Preference Day and Bid Day are the buyer and seller, respectively. Matching markets are markets where the buyer and seller both have strong preferences with who would receive what, and it is not driven by price. This means that just one side cannot choose, but also has to pick the choices that are not in the form of money will dominate the choosing.
The difference between markets that are driven by price and markets that aren’t driven by price is that markets with monetary preferences are commodity markets. In commodity markets, the market merely discovers the price where supply matches demand. However, the markets with non-monetary preferences with relationships embedded, such as the Bama Rush process, are matching markets.