The roommates problem revisited

Abstract

One of the oldest matching problems is Gale and Shapley's (1962) [8] “roommates problem”: is there a stable way to assign 2 N students into N roommate pairs? Unlike the classic marriage problem or college admissions problem, there need not exist a stable solution to the roommates problem. However, stability ignores the key physical constraint that roommates require a room and is therefore too restrictive. This motivates a new matching problem: matching agents subject to an initial assignment. A particularly important example is kidney exchange where after an assignment has been made, subsequent tests may determine that a patient and donor are incompatible. This paper introduces an efficient algorithm for finding a Pareto improvement starting from any status quo roommates assignment.