Instability in Stable Marriage Problem: Matching Unequally Numbered Men and Women

Abstract

The Stable Marriage Problem is to find a one-to-one matching for two equally sized sets of agents. Due to its widespread applications in the real world, especially the unique importance to the centralized match maker, a very large number of questions have been extensively studied in this field. This article considers a generalized form of stable marriage problem, where different numbers of men and women need to be matched pairwise and the emergence of single is inevitable. Theoretical analysis and numerical simulations confirm that even small deviations from equal number of two sides can have a large impact on matching solution of Gale-Shapley Algorithm. These results provide insights to many of the real-world applications when matching two sides with unequal number.