Strategic play in stable marriage problem

Abstract

The stable marriage problem, as addressed by Gale and Shapely [1] consists of providing a bipartite matching between n " boys " and n " girls "-each of whom have a totally ordered preference list over the other set-such that there exists no " boy " and no " girl " that would prefer each other over their partner in the matching. In this paper, we analyze the cases of strategic play by the " boys " in the game directly inspired by this problem. We provide an O(n^3) algorithm for determining a matching which is not necessarily stable in the Gale-Shapely sense, but it is coalition-stable, in that no player has a selfish interest to leave the resulting grand coalition to join any potential alternative one which might feasibly form, and is also man-optimal. Thus, under a realistic assumption set, no player has an interest to " destabilize " the matching, even though he theoretically could. The resulting matching is often better than the naïve Gale-Shapely one for some (not all) of the " boys " , being no worse for the rest. This matching is more realistic (stable) than the one produced by top-trading-cycles method, thus offering a qualitative improvement over the latter. Furthermore, we analyze the situation when players are allowed to make strategic threats (i.e. be willing to sacrifice their own outcome to hurt others), offer a relevant example to illustrate the benefits of this form of play, and ultimately provide an exponential time algorithm which tries to determine a good threat-making strategy. We then briefly examine a few other non-conventional possibilities a player has to affect his outcome. Most common variations to the game model are also described and analyzed with regard to applicability of the methods in this paper. Finally, a few examples of real-life problems which can be modeled and solved with the methods in this paper are presented.