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I'm thinking of the following problem: There's a set $M$ of men and a set $W$ of women; furthermore there's a set $S$ of "possible marriages". Each possible marriage is a triple $(m, w, x)$, consisting of a man $m \in M$, a woman $w \in W$ and some arbitrary piece of extra information $x$.

For a man $m$, let $S_m = \{(m', w', x) \in S \mid m = m'\}$ be the set of possible marriages involving him, and for any woman $w$, let $S_w = \{(m', w', x) \in S \mid w = w'\}$ be the set of possible marriages involving her.

Instead of ranking the women he would marry, a man $m$ ranks the possible marriages: There is a total ordering $\leq_m$ defined on $S_m$. Similarly, for any woman $w$, there is a total ordering $\leq_w$ defined on $S_w$.

The problem is to find a stable matching. A stable matching is now a subset $X \subseteq S$ such that

  • every person is matched at most once, that is, for each man $m$, the intersection $X \cap S_m$ has at most one element, and for each woman $w$, the intersection $X \cap S_w$ has at most one element, and
  • $X$ is stable in the sense that for each possible marriage $s \in S$ between a man $m$ and a woman $w$, either

  • $m$ is in a marriage that is at least as good for him as $s$, that is, there is some $s' \in X \cap S_m$ such that $s' \geq_m s$, or
  • $w$ is in a marriage that is at least as good for her as $s$, that is, there is some $s' \in X \cap S_w$ such that $s' \geq_w s$.

The classical stable marriage problem is equivalent to the restricted version of this problem where for each possibe marriage $(m, w, x) \in S$, the "extra information" $x$ is required to be some fixed dummy value.

Has anybody studied this generalization and given it some name? If not, is there some naming convention for "this kind of generalization"?

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Yes, this has been studied. Look up "matching with contracts" and the earlier papers by Crawford & Knoer (1981), and Kelso & Crawford (1982) in Econometrica.

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  • $\begingroup$ Thanks a lot! Crawford & Knoer (1981) and Kelso & Crawford (1982) seem to be more restricted, but "matching with contracts" (which seems to be introduced in Hatfield & Milgrom (2005)) seems to be exactly what I was looking for! $\endgroup$
    – dankness
    Sep 13, 2017 at 1:44
  • $\begingroup$ @dankness It is actually possible to embed the Hatfield & Milgrom model in the Kelso and Crawford model. See this paper. $\endgroup$ Sep 13, 2017 at 6:10

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