On the Susceptibility of the Deferred Acceptance Algorithm

H. Aziz, H. Seedig, J. von Wedel
AAMAS 2015
Abstract
The Deferred Acceptance Algorithm (DAA) is the most widely accepted and used algorithm to match students, workers, or residents to colleges, firms or hospitals respectively. In this paper, we consider for the first time, the complexity of manipulating DAA by agents such as colleges that have capacity more than one. For such agents, truncation is not an exhaustive strategy. We present efficient algorithms to compute a manipulation for the colleges when the colleges are proposing or being proposed to. We then conduct detailed experiments on the frequency of manipulable instances in order to get better insight into strategic aspects of two-sided matching markets. Our results bear somewhat negative news: assuming that agents have information other agents' preference, they not only often have an incentive to misreport but there exist efficient algorithms to find such a misreport.

Remarks: Two-sided matchings. We consider preferences of one side over the other.

Experiments:

Election type Culture Candidates Voters Instances Parameters
Ordinal Impartial Culture {15, 30} {100, 200} 1000 None
Ordinal Impartial Culture {100, 200} {15, 30} 1000 None
Ordinal Mallows Mixture {15, 30} {100, 200} 1000 Unclear what parameters were used.
Ordinal Mallows Mixture {100, 200} {15, 30} 1000 Unclear what parameters were used.