On constrained matchings, stable under random preferences
Abstract
Colloquially, there are two groups, men and women, each man (woman) ranking women (men) as potential marriage partners. A complete matching is called stable if no unmatched pair prefer each other to their partners in the matching. If some pairs are not admissible, then such a matching may not exist, but a properly defined partial stable matching exists always, and all such matchings involve the same, equi-numerous, groups of men and women. Earlier we proved that, for the complete, random, preference lists, with high probability (whp) the total number of complete stable matchings is, roughly, of order , at least. Here we consider the case that the preference lists are still complete, but a generic pair (man,woman) is admissible with probability , independently of all other pairs. It is shown that the expected number of complete stable matchings tends to if, roughly, and to infinity if . We show that whp: (a) there exists a complete stable matching if , (b) the number of unmatched men and women is bounded if , and (c) this number grows as a fractional power of for .
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2406.10319,
title = {On constrained matchings, stable under random preferences},
author = {Boris Pittel},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2406.10319},
year = {2024}
}