Stable Matching: Dealing with Changes in Preferences

Abstract

We study stable matchings that are robust to preference changes in the two-sided stable matching setting of Gale and Shapley[GS62]. Given two instances $A$ and $B$ on the same set of agents, a matching is said to be robust if it is stable under both instances. While prior work has considered the case where a single agent changes preferences between $A$ and $B$, we allow multiple agents on both sides to update their preferences and ask whether three central properties of stable matchings extend to robust stable matchings: (i) Can a robust stable matching be found in polynomial time? (ii) Does the set of robust stable matchings form a lattice? (iii) Is the fractional robust stable matching polytope integral? We show that all three properties hold when any number of agents on one side change preferences, as long as at most one agent on the other side does. For the case where two or more agents on both sides change preferences, we construct examples showing that both the lattice structure and polyhedral integrality fail-identifying this setting as a sharp threshold. We also present an XP-time algorithm for the general case, which implies a polynomial-time algorithm when the number of agents with changing preferences is constant. While these results establish the tractability of these regimes, closing the complexity gap in the fully general setting remains an interesting open question.