Characterization of cores of assignment games

We consider the assignment game of Shapley and Shubik (1972). We prove that the class of possible cores of such games (expressed in terms of payoffs for players on one side of the market) is exactly the same as a special class of polytopes, called 45-lattices. These results parallel similar work done by Conway (in Knuth, 1976) and Blair (1984) for marriage markets.Research supported by the Office of Naval Technology.