"Almost-stable" matchings in the Hospitals / Residents problem with Couples.

ABSTRACT: The Hospitals / Residents problem with Couples (hrc) models the allocation of intending junior doctors to hospitals where couples are allowed to submit joint preference lists over pairs of (typically geographically close) hospitals. It is known that a stable matching need not exist, so we consider min bp hrc, the problem of finding a matching that admits the minimum number of blocking pairs (i.e., is "as stable as possible"). We show that this problem is NP-hard and difficult to approximate even in the highly restricted case that each couple finds only one hospital pair acceptable. However if we further assume that the preference list of each single resident and hospital is of length at most 2, we give a polynomial-time algorithm for this case. We then present the first Integer Programming

SUBMITTER: Manlove DF 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7115081 | biostudies-literature | 2017

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature