Quasi-popular Matchings, Optimality, and Extended Formulations Yuri Faenza1 and Telikepalli Kavitha2? 1 IEOR, Columbia University, New York, USA.
[email protected] 2 Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai, India.
[email protected] Abstract. Let G = (A [ B; E) be an instance of the stable marriage problem where every vertex ranks its neighbors in a strict order of preference. A matching M in G is popular if M does not lose a head-to-head election against any matching N. That is, φ(M; N) ≥ φ(N; M) where φ(M; N) (similarly, φ(N; M)) is the number of votes for M (resp., N) in the M-vs-N election. Popular matchings are a well- studied generalization of stable matchings, introduced with the goal of enlarging the set of admissible solutions, while maintaining a certain level of fairness. Every stable matching is a popular matching of minimum size. Unfortunately, it is NP-hard to find a popular matching of minimum cost, when a linear cost function is given on the edge set – even worse, the min-cost popular matching problem is hard to approximate up to any factor. Let opt be the cost of a min-cost popular matching. Our goal is to efficiently compute a matching of cost at most opt by paying the price of mildly relaxing popularity. Call a matching M quasi-popular if φ(M; N) ≥ φ(N; M)=2 for every matching N. Our main positive result is a bi-criteria algorithm that finds in polynomial time a quasi-popular matching of cost at most opt.