We introduce the classified stable matching problem, a problem motivated by academic hiring. Suppose that a number of institutes are hiring faculty members from a pool of applicants. Both institutes and applicants have preferences over the other side. An institute classifies the applicants based on their research areas (or any other criterion), and, for each class, it sets a lower bound and an upper bound on the number of applicants it would hire in that class. The objective is to find a stable matching from which no group of participants has reason to deviate. Moreover, the matching should respect the upper lower bounds of the classes. In the first part of the paper, we study classified stable matching problems whose classifications belong to a fixed set of order types.'' We show that if the set consists entirely of downward forests, there is a polynomial-time algorithm; otherwise, it is NP-complete to decide the existence of a stable matching. In the second part, we investigate the problem using a polyhedral approach. Suppose that all classifications are laminar families and there is no lower bound. We propose a set of linear inequalities to describe stable matching polytope and prove that it is integral. This integrality allows us to find various optimal stable matchings using Ellipsoid algorithm. A further ramification of our result is the description of the stable matching polytope for the many-to-many (unclassified) stable matching problem. This answers an open question posed by Sethuraman, Teo and Qian.
Abraham, Irving and Manlove introduced the student-project allocation problem @cite_2 . It can be shown that in , if all classifications are just partitions over the applicants and there is no lower bound, our problem is equivalent to a special case of their problem. They posed the open question whether there is a polynomial time algorithm for their problem if there is lower bound on the projects (classes). Our result in Section 2 gives a partial positive answer.
@cite_2
2012500540
We study the Student-Project Allocation problem (SPA), a generalisation of the classical Hospitals Residents problem (HR). An instance of SPA involves a set of students, projects and lecturers. Each project is offered by a unique lecturer, and both projects and lecturers have capacity constraints. Students have preferences over projects, whilst lecturers have preferences over students. We present two optimal linear-time algorithms for allocating students to projects, subject to the preference and capacity constraints. In particular, each algorithm finds a stable matching of students to projects. Here, the concept of stability generalises the stability definition in the HR context. The stable matching produced by the first algorithm is simultaneously best-possible for all students, whilst the one produced by the second algorithm is simultaneously best-possible for all lecturers. We also prove some structural results concerning the set of stable matchings in a given instance of SPA. The SPA problem model that we consider is very general and has applications to a range of different contexts besides student-project allocation.