Understanding popular matchings via stable matchings

DOI10.1137/19M124770XzbMATH Open1483.91135arXiv1811.06897OpenAlexW4206620227MaRDI QIDQ5028352FDOQ5028352

Authors: Ágnes Cseh, Yuri Faenza, Telikepalli Kavitha, Vladlena Powers 

Publication date: 9 February 2022

Published in: SIAM Journal on Discrete Mathematics (Search for Journal in Brave)

Abstract: Let $G=(AcupB,E)$ be an instance of the stable marriage problem with strict preference lists. A matching $M$ is popular in $G$ if $M$ does not lose a head-to-head election against any matching where vertices are voters. Every stable matching is a min-size popular matching; another subclass of popular matchings that always exist and can be easily computed is the set of dominant matchings. A popular matching $M$ is dominant if $M$ wins the head-to-head election against any larger matching. Thus every dominant matching is a max-size popular matching and it is known that the set of dominant matchings is the linear image of the set of stable matchings in an auxiliary graph. Results from the literature seem to suggest that stable and dominant matchings behave, from a complexity theory point of view, in a very similar manner within the class of popular matchings. The goal of this paper is to show that indeed there are differences in the tractability of stable and dominant matchings, and to investigate further their importance for popular matchings. First, we show that it is easy to check if all popular matchings are also stable, however it is co-NP hard to check if all popular matchings are also dominant. Second, we show how some new and recent hardness results on popular matching problems can be deduced from the NP-hardness of certain problems on stable matchings, also studied in this paper, thus showing that stable matchings can be employed not only to show positive results on popular matching (as is known), but also most negative ones. Problems for which we show new hardness results include finding a min-size (resp. max-size) popular matching that is not stable (resp. dominant). A known result for which we give a new and simple proof is the NP-hardness of finding a popular matching when $G$ is non-bipartite.

Full work available at URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/1811.06897

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zbMATH Keywords

complexitystable matchingpopular matchingdominant matching

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Applications of graph theory (05C90) Computational difficulty of problems (lower bounds, completeness, difficulty of approximation, etc.) (68Q17) Matching models (91B68)

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Cited In (9)

• Maintaining Near-Popular Matchings
• Popular Matchings: Structure and Strategic Issues
• Popularity, Mixed Matchings, and Self-Duality
• Popular Matchings -- structure and cheating strategies
• Popular matchings and limits to tractability
• Popular critical matchings in the many-to-many setting
• Quasi-popular matchings, optimality, and extended formulations
• Popular Matchings: Structure and Algorithms
• Maximum matchings and popularity

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