Anna Karlin

The Stable Marriage Problem

Suppose a set of men and women each provide a ranking over members of the opposite sex. Given these rankings, is there guaranteed to be a *stable* way to match them up? (A pairing is said to be unstable if there is a man and a woman that mutually prefer each other to the person they are matched to.) The 2012 Nobel Prize in Economics was awarded for work on this problem and variants of it*. In this segment, we will explore the mathematics and algorithmics underlying this and related questions.

The 2012 Nobel Prize in Economics was awarded to Alvin Roth and Lloyd Shapley for "the theory of stable allocations and the practice of market design".