Canonical monotone decompositions of fractional stable matchings

Abstract

This paper continues recent work that introduced algebraic methods for studying the stable marriage problem of Gale and Shapley [1962]. Vande Vate [1989] and Rothblum [1992] identified a set of linear inequalities which define a polytope whose extreme points correspond to the stable matchings. Points in this polytope are called fractional stable matchings. Here we identify a unique representation of fractional stable matchings as a convex combination of stable matchings that are arrangeable in a man-decreasing order. We refer to this representation and to a dual one, in terms of woman-decreasing order, as the canonical monotone representations. These representations can be interpreted as time-sharing stable matchings where particular stable matchings are used at each time-instance but the scheduled stable matchings are (occasionally) switched over time. The new representations allow us to extend, in a natural way, the lattice structure of the set of stable matchings to the set of all fractional stable matchings.