Manipulation and gender neutrality in stable marriage procedures
Abstract
The stable marriage problem is a well-known problem of matching men to women so that no man and woman who are not married to each other both prefer each other. Such a problem has a wide variety of practical applications ranging from matching resident doctors to hospitals to matching students to schools. A well-known algorithm to solve this problem is the Gale-Shapley algorithm, which runs in polynomial time. It has been proven that stable marriage procedures can always be manipulated. Whilst the Gale-Shapley algorithm is computationally easy to manipulate, we prove that there exist stable marriage procedures which are NP-hard to manipulate. We also consider the relationship between voting theory and stable marriage procedures, showing that voting rules which are NP-hard to manipulate can be used to define stable marriage procedures which are themselves NP-hard to manipulate. Finally, we consider the issue that stable marriage procedures like Gale-Shapley favour one gender over the other, and we show how to use voting rules to make any stable marriage procedure gender neutral.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.0909.4437,
title = {Manipulation and gender neutrality in stable marriage procedures},
author = {Maria Pini and Francesca Rossi and Brent Venable and Toby Walsh},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0909.4437},
year = {2009}
}
Comments
8th International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2009), Budapest, Hungary, May 10-15, 2009, Volume 1