We study the problem of assigning jobs to applicants. Each applicant has a weight and provides a preference list ranking a subset of the jobs. A matching M is popular if there is no other matching M' such that the weight of the applicants who prefer M' over M exceeds the weight of those who prefer M over M'. This paper gives efficient algorithms to find a popular matching if one exists.
Following the publication of the work of Abraham al @cite_11 , the topic of unweighted popular matchings has been further explored in many interesting directions. Suppose we want to go from an arbitrary matching to some popular matching by a sequence of matchings each more popular than the previous; Abraham and Kavitha @cite_0 showed that there is always a sequence of length at most two and gave a linear time algorithm to find it. One of the main drawbacks of popular matchings is that they may not always exist; Mahdian @cite_10 nicely addressed this issue by showing that the probability that a random instance admits a popular matching depends on the ratio @math , and exhibits a phase transition around @math . Motivated by a house allocation application, Manlove and Sng @cite_1 gave fast algorithms for popular assignments with capacities on the jobs.
@cite_0 @cite_1 @cite_10 @cite_11
1529648317 2096797149 2605027943 2547342773
We investigate the following problem: given a set of jobs and a set of people with preferences over the jobs, what is the optimal way of matching people to jobs? Here we consider the notion of popularity. A matching Mis popular if there is no matching Mi¾? such that more people prefer Mi¾? to Mthan the other way around. Determining whether a given instance admits a popular matching and, if so, finding one, was studied in [2]. If there is no popular matching, a reasonable substitute is a matching whose unpopularityis bounded. We consider two measures of unpopularity - unpopularity factordenoted by u(M) and unpopularity margindenoted by g(M). McCutchen recently showed that computing a matching Mwith the minimum value of u(M) or g(M) is NP-hard, and that if Gdoes not admit a popular matching, then we have u(M) i¾? 2 for all matchings Min G. Here we show that a matching Mthat achieves u(M) = 2 can be computed in @math time (where mis the number of edges in Gand nis the number of nodes) provided a certain graph Hadmits a matching that matches all people. We also describe a sequence of graphs: H= H 2 , H 3 ,...,H k such that if H k admits a matching that matches all people, then we can compute in @math time a matching Msuch that u(M) ≤ ki¾? 1 and @math . Simulation results suggest that our algorithm finds a matching with low unpopularity. We study the problem of matching applicants to jobs under one-sided preferences; that is, each applicant ranks a non-empty subset of jobs under an order of preference, possibly involving ties. A matching M is said to be more popular than T if the applicants that prefer M to T outnumber those that prefer T to M. A matching is said to be popular if there is no matching more popular than it. Equivalently, a matching M is popular if @f(M,T)>[email protected](T,M) for all matchings T, where @f(X,Y) is the number of applicants that prefer X to Y. Previously studied solution concepts based on the popularity criterion are either not guaranteed to exist for every instance (e.g., popular matchings) or are NP-hard to compute (e.g., least unpopular matchings). This paper addresses this issue by considering mixed matchings. A mixed matching is simply a probability distribution over matchings in the input graph. The function @f that compares two matchings generalizes in a natural manner to mixed matchings by taking expectation. A mixed matching P is popular if @f(P,Q)>[email protected](Q,P) for all mixed matchings Q. We show that popular mixed matchings always exist and we design polynomial time algorithms for finding them. Then we study their efficiency and give tight bounds on the price of anarchy and price of stability of the popular matching problem. Copyright © 2017, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (www.aaai.org). All rights reserved. Motivated by the fact that in several cases a matching in a graph is stable if and only if it is produced by a greedy algorithm, we study the problem of computing a maximum weight greedy matching on weighted graphs, termed GREEDY-MATCHING. In wide contrast to the maximum weight matching problem, for which many efficient algorithms are known, we prove that GREEDYMATCHING is strongly NP-hard and APX-complete, and thus it does not admit a PTAS unless P=NP, even on graphs with maximum degree at most 3 and with at most three different integer edge weights. Furthermore we prove that GREEDYMATCHING is strongly NP-hard if the input graph is in addition bipartite. Moreover we consider three natural parameters of the problem, for which we establish a sharp threshold behavior between NP-hardness and computational tractability. On the positive side, we present a randomized approximation algorithm (RGMA) for GREEDYMATCHING on a special class of weighted graphs, called bush graphs. We highlight an unexpected connection between RGMA and the approximation of maximum cardinality matching in unweighted graphs via randomized greedy algorithms. We show that, if the approximation ratio of RGMA is θ, then for every ϵ > 0 the randomized MRG algorithm of ( 1995) gives a (ρ - ϵ)-approximation for the maximum cardinality matching. We conjecture that a tight bound for ρ is 2 3; we prove our conjecture true for four subclasses of bush graphs. Proving a tight bound for the approximation ratio of MRG on unweighted graphs (and thus also proving a tight value for ρ) is a long-standing open problem (Poloczek and Szegedy 2012). This unexpected relation of our RGMA algorithm with the MRG algorithm may provide new insights for solving this problem. In an instance G = (A union B, E) of the stable marriage problem with strict and possibly incomplete preference lists, a matching M is popular if there is no matching M0 where the vertices that prefer M' to M outnumber those that prefer M to M'. All stable matchings are popular and there is a simple linear time algorithm to compute a maximum-size popular matching. More generally, what we seek is a min-cost popular matching where we assume there is a cost function c : E -> Q. However there is no polynomial time algorithm currently known for solving this problem. Here we consider the following generalization of a popular matching called a popular half-integral matching: this is a fractional matching x = (M_1 + M_2) 2, where M1 and M2 are the 0-1 edge incidence vectors of matchings in G, such that x satisfies popularity constraints. We show that every popular half-integral matching is equivalent to a stable matching in a larger graph G^*. This allows us to solve the min-cost popular half-integral matching problem in polynomial time.