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The Stable Roommates Problem with Choice Functions

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Abstract

The stable marriage theorem of Gale and Shapley states that for n men and n women there always exists a stable marriage scheme, that is, a set of marriages such that no man and woman mutually prefer one another to their partners. The stable marriage theorem was generalized in two directions: the stable roommates problem is the “one-sided” version, where any two agents on the market can form a partnership. The generalization by Kelso and Crawford is in the “two-sided” model, but on one side of the market agents have a so-called substitutable choice function, and stability is interpreted in a natural way. It turned out that even if both sides of the market have substitutable choice functions, there still exists a stable assignment. The latter version contains the “many-to-many” model where up to a personal quota, polygamy is allowed for both men and women in the two-sided market.

The goal of this work is to solve the stable partnership problem, a generalization of the one-sided model with substitutable choice functions. We do not quite reach that: besides substitutability, we also need for the result the so called increasing property (or, in other terminology, the law of aggregate demand). Luckily, choice functions in well-known stable matching theorems comply with this property. The main result is a generalization of Irving’s algorithm, the first efficient method to solve the stable roommates problem. We deduce from the algorithm a generalization of Tan’s result on characterizing the existence of a stable matching and prove a generalization of the rural hospital theorem and the so-called splitting property of many-to-many stable matchings. We show that our algorithm is linear-time in some sense and indicate that for general (i.e. not necessarily increasing) substitutable choice functions the stable partnership problem is NP-complete.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science and Information Theory, Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Magyar Tudósok Körútja 2, 1117, Budapest, Hungary

    Tamás Fleiner

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  1. Tamás Fleiner
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Correspondence to Tamás Fleiner.

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Research is supported by OTKA grants K69027 and K60802, the MTA-ELTE Egerváry Research Group (EGRES) and the János Bolyai research fellowship of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.

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Fleiner, T. The Stable Roommates Problem with Choice Functions. Algorithmica 58, 82–101 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00453-009-9314-3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00453-009-9314-3

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