TY - GEN
T1 - Exchange markets stability in barter
AU - Gupta, Sushmita
AU - Saurabh, Saket
AU - Panolan, Fahad
AU - Zehavi, Meirav
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2018 International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (www.ifaamas.org). All rights reserved.
PY - 2018/1/1
Y1 - 2018/1/1
N2 - The notion of stability is the foundation of several classic problems in economics and computer science that arise in a wide-variety of real-world situations, including Stable Marriage, Stable Room-mate, Hospital Resident and Group Activity Selection. We study this notion in the context of barter exchange markets. The input of our problem of interest consists of a set of people offering goods/services, with each person subjectively assigning values to a subset of goods/services offered by other people. The goal is to find a stable transaction, a set of cycles that is stable in the following sense: there does not exist a cycle such that every person participating in that cycle prefers to his current "status". For example, consider a market where families are seeking vacation rentals and offering their own homes for the same. Each family wishes to acquire a vacation home in exchange of its own home without any monetary exchange. We study such a market by analyzing a stable transaction of houses involving cycles of fixed length. The underlying rationale is that an entire trade/exchange fails if any of the participating agents cancels the agreement; as a result, shorter (trading) cycles are desirable. We show that given a transaction, it can be verified whether or not it is stable in polynomial time, and that the problem of finding a stable transaction is NP-hard even if each person desires only a small number of other goods/services. Having established these results, we study the problem of finding a stable transaction in the framework of parameterized algorithms.
AB - The notion of stability is the foundation of several classic problems in economics and computer science that arise in a wide-variety of real-world situations, including Stable Marriage, Stable Room-mate, Hospital Resident and Group Activity Selection. We study this notion in the context of barter exchange markets. The input of our problem of interest consists of a set of people offering goods/services, with each person subjectively assigning values to a subset of goods/services offered by other people. The goal is to find a stable transaction, a set of cycles that is stable in the following sense: there does not exist a cycle such that every person participating in that cycle prefers to his current "status". For example, consider a market where families are seeking vacation rentals and offering their own homes for the same. Each family wishes to acquire a vacation home in exchange of its own home without any monetary exchange. We study such a market by analyzing a stable transaction of houses involving cycles of fixed length. The underlying rationale is that an entire trade/exchange fails if any of the participating agents cancels the agreement; as a result, shorter (trading) cycles are desirable. We show that given a transaction, it can be verified whether or not it is stable in polynomial time, and that the problem of finding a stable transaction is NP-hard even if each person desires only a small number of other goods/services. Having established these results, we study the problem of finding a stable transaction in the framework of parameterized algorithms.
KW - Algorithm design
KW - Barter exchange
KW - FPT
KW - Stability
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85054639446&partnerID=8YFLogxK
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85054639446
SN - 9781510868083
T3 - Proceedings of the International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, AAMAS
SP - 1371
EP - 1379
BT - 17th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, AAMAS 2018
PB - International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (IFAAMAS)
T2 - 17th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, AAMAS 2018
Y2 - 10 July 2018 through 15 July 2018
ER -