The Temporary Exchange Problem

Abstract

We formalize an allocation model under ordinal preferences that is more general than the well-studied Shapley-Scarf housing market. In our model, the agents do not just care which house or resource they get but also care about who gets their own resource. This assumption is especially important when considering temporary exchanges in which each resource is eventually returned to the owner. We show that several positive axiomatic and computational results that hold for housing markets do not extend to the more general setting. We then identify natural restrictions on the preferences of agents for which several positive results do hold. One of our central results is a general class of algorithms that return any allocation that is individually rational and Pareto optimal with respect to the responsive set extension.