Marriage and Roommate

Abstract

This paper has two objectives. One is to give a linear time algorithm that solves the stable roommates problem (i.e., obtains one stable matching) using the stable marriage problem. The idea is that a stable matching of a roommate instance [Formula: see text] is a stable matching (that however must satisfy a certain condition) of some marriage instance [Formula: see text]. [Formula: see text] is obtained just by making two copies of [Formula: see text], one for the men’s table and the other for the women’s table. The second objective is to investigate the possibility of reducing the roommate problem to the marriage problem (with one-to-one correspondence between their stable matchings) in polynomial time. For a given [Formula: see text], we construct the rotation POSET [Formula: see text] of [Formula: see text] and then we “halve” it to obtain [Formula: see text], by which we can forget the above condition and can use all the closed subsets of [Formula: see text] for all the stable matchings of [Formula: see text]. Unfortunately this approach works (runs in polynomial time) only for restricted instances.