English

On random exchange-stable matchings

Combinatorics 2017-07-25 v2

Abstract

Consider the group of nn men and nn women, each with their own preference list for a potential marriage partner. The stable marriage is a bipartite matching such that no unmatched pair (man, woman) prefer each other to their partners in the matching. Its non-bipartite version, with an even number nn of members, is known as the stable roommates problem. Jose Alcalde introduced an alternative notion of exchange-stable, one-sided, matching: no two members prefer each other's partners to their own partners in the matching. Katarina Cechl\'arov\'a and David Manlove showed that the e-stable matching decision problem is NPNP-complete for both types of matchings. We prove that the expected number of e-stable matchings is asymptotic to (πn2)1/2\left(\frac{\pi n}{2}\right)^{1/2} for two-sided case, and to e1/2e^{1/2} for one-sided case. However, the standard deviation of this number exceeds 1.13n1.13^n, (1.06n1.06^n resp.). As an obvious byproduct, there exist instances of preference lists with at least 1.13n1.13^n (1.06n1.06^n resp.) e-stable matchings. The probability that there is no matching which is stable and e-stable is at least 1en1/6+o(1)1-e^{-n^{1/6+o(1)}}, (1O(2n/2)1-O(2^{-n/2}) resp.).

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1707.01540,
  title  = {On random exchange-stable matchings},
  author = {Boris Pittel},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1707.01540},
  year   = {2017}
}

Comments

This revision contains a new result on likely incompatibility of classical stability and exchange stability. New references are added as well

R2 v1 2026-06-22T20:39:01.708Z