English

Minimal instances with no weakly stable matching for three-sided problem with cyclic incomplete preferences

Combinatorics 2021-07-22 v2

Abstract

Given nn men, nn women, and nn dogs, each man has an incomplete preference list of women, each woman does an incomplete preference list of dogs, and each dog does an incomplete preference list of men. We understand a family as a triple consisting of one man, one woman, and one dog such that each of them enters in the preference list of the corresponding agent. We do a matching as a collection of nonintersecting families (some agents, possibly, remain single). A matching is said to be nonstable, if one can find a man, a woman, and a dog which do not live together currently but each of them would become "happier" if they do. Otherwise the matching is said to be stable (a weakly stable matching in 3-DSMI-CYC problem). We give an example of this problem for n=3n=3 where no stable matching exists. Moreover, we prove the absence of such an example for n<3n<3. Such an example was known earlier only for n=6n=6 (Biro, McDermid, 2010). The constructed examples also allows one to decrease (in two times) the size of the recently constructed analogous example for complete preference lists (Lam, Plaxton, 2019).

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2101.08223,
  title  = {Minimal instances with no weakly stable matching for three-sided problem with cyclic incomplete preferences},
  author = {E. Yu. Lerner and R. E. Lerner},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2101.08223},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

12 pages, 4 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-23T22:21:36.574Z