Matching-Updating Mechanism: A Solution for the Stable Marriage Problem with Dynamic Preferences

Abstract

We studied the stable marriage problem with dynamic preferences. The dynamic preference model allows the agent to change its preferences at any time, which may cause instability in a matching. However, preference changing in SMP instances does not necessarily break all pairs of an existing match. Sometimes, only a few couples want to change their partners, while others choose to stay with their current partners; this motivates us to find stable matching on a new instance by updating an existing match rather than restarting the matching process from scratch. By using the update mechanism, we try to minimize the revision cost when rematching occurs. The challenge when updating a matching is that a cyclic process may exist, and stable matching is never achieved. Our proposed mechanism can update a match and avoid the cyclic process.