Allocation is a fundamental task

  • Students into flats
  • Employees into teams
  • Medical students to hospitals
  • Students to supervisor for projects

Want the allocation to be ‘stable

  • Of course, probably cannot make everyone happy at the same time!
  • Can we at least enforce something reasonable!
  • Eg:- If two people prefer each other to their current partners, then they will leave their current partners and become partners.
  • We call such pairs as an unstable pair
  • An allocation is stable if there are no unstable pairs

Need to introduce notion of preferences