Introduction to Stable Marriage Problem

The formal introduction is in the text. For reference, the particular example that we considered was with preferences as follows.

Companies  (ranking of applicants)
----------
Google:    W,X,Z,Y
NSA:       W,Y,Z,X
Boeing:    X,W,Y,Z
Microsoft: W,Z,X,Y

Applicants (ranking of companies)
----------
W:       Microsoft,NSA,Boeing,Google
X:       Microsoft,NSA,Google,Boeing
Y:       Google,Microsoft,NSA,Boeing
Z:       NSA,Google,Microsoft,Boeing

The stable marriage solution that we identifed, was as follows:

(Google,X)
(NSA,Y)
(Boeing,Z)
(Microsoft,W)
Though we have not proved so, in this particuar instance, this is the only legal solution (more generally, there may be many).


Michael Goldwasser