Popular and Dominant Matchings with Uncertain, Multilayer and Aggregated Preferences

Abstract: We study the Popular Matching problem in multiple models, where the preferences of the agents in the instance may change or may be unknown/uncertain. In particular, we study an Uncertainty model, where each agent has a possible set of preferences, a Multilayer model, where there are layers of preference profiles, a Robust model, where any agent may move some other agents up or down some places in his preference list and an Aggregated Preference model, where votes are summed over multiple instances with different preferences. We study both one-sided and two-sided preferences in bipartite graphs. In the one-sided model, we show that all our problems can be solved in polynomial time by utilizing the structure of popular matchings. We also obtain nice structural results. With two-sided preferences, we show that all four above models lead to NP-hard questions for popular matchings. By utilizing the connection between dominant matchings and stable matchings, we show that in the robust and uncertainty model, a certainly dominant matching in all possible prefernce profiles can be found in polynomial-time, whereas in the multilayer and aggregated models, the problem remains NP-hard for dominant matchings too. We also answer an open question about $d$-robust stable matchings.