Stable and Pareto optimal group activity selection from ordinal preferences

Abstract

In several situations agents need to be assigned to activities on basis of their preferences, and each agent can take part in at most one activity. Often, the preferences of the agents do not depend only on the activity itself but also on the number of participants in the respective activity. In the setting we consider, the agents hence have preferences over pairs “(activity, group size)” including the possibility “do nothing”; in this work, these preferences are assumed to be strict orders. The task will be to find stable assignments of agents to activities, for different concepts of stability such as Nash or core stability, and Pareto optimal assignments respectively. In this respect, particular focus is laid on two natural special cases of agents’ preferences inherent in the considered model, namely increasing and decreasing preferences, where agents want to share an activity with as many (as few, respectively) agents as possible.