Manipulation complexity and gender neutrality in stable marriage procedures

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 quadratic time in the number of men/women. 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 fav...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2011
• Where: AAMAS
• Authors: Maria Silvia Pini, Francesca Rossi, Kristen Brent Venable, Toby Walsh
• Keywords: AAMAS 2011, Gale-Shapley Algorithm, Intelligent Agents, Stable Marriage Problem, Stable Marriage Procedure