Authors:
Maria Silvia Pini
1
;
Francesca Rossi
1
;
Kristen Brent Venable
1
and
Toby Walsh
2
Affiliations:
1
University of Padova, Italy
;
2
NICTA and UNSW, Australia
Keyword(s):
Stable marriages, Weighted preferences.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Agents
;
Artificial Intelligence
;
Artificial Intelligence and Decision Support Systems
;
Distributed and Mobile Software Systems
;
Enterprise Information Systems
;
Knowledge Engineering and Ontology Development
;
Knowledge Representation and Reasoning
;
Knowledge-Based Systems
;
Multi-Agent Systems
;
Software Engineering
;
Symbolic Systems
Abstract:
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 or more generally to any two-sided market. In the classical stable marriage problem, both men and women express a strict preference order over the members of the other sex, in a qualitative way. Here we consider stable marriage problems with weighted preferences: each man (resp., woman) provides a score for each woman (resp., man). Such problems are more expressive than the classical stable marriage problems. Moreover, in some real-life situations it is more natural to express scores (to model, for example, profits or costs) rather than a qualitative preference ordering. In this context, we define new notions of stability and optimality, and we provide algorithms to find marriage
s which are stable and/or optimal according to these notions. While expressivity greatly increases by adopting weighted preferences, we show that in most cases the desired solutions can be found by adapting existing algorithms for the classical stable marriage problem.
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