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House Allocation Problem
In economics and computer science, the house allocation problem is the problem of assigning objects to people with different preferences, such that each person receives exactly one object. The name "house allocation" comes from the main motivating application, which is assigning dormitory houses to students. Other commonly used terms are assignment problem and one-sided matching. When agents already own houses (and may trade them with other agents), the problem is often called a housing market. In house allocation problems, it is assumed that monetary transfers are not allowed; the variant in which monetary transfers are allowed is known as rental harmony. Definitions There are ''n'' people (also called: ''agents''), and m objects (also called: ''houses''). The agents may have different preferences over the houses. They may express their preferences in various ways: * ''Binary valuations'': each agent values each house at either 1 (which means that the agent likes the house), or 0 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Economics
Economics () is the social science that studies the Production (economics), production, distribution (economics), distribution, and Consumption (economics), consumption of goods and services. Economics focuses on the behaviour and interactions of Agent (economics), economic agents and how economy, economies work. Microeconomics analyzes what's viewed as basic elements in the economy, including individual agents and market (economics), markets, their interactions, and the outcomes of interactions. Individual agents may include, for example, households, firms, buyers, and sellers. Macroeconomics analyzes the economy as a system where production, consumption, saving, and investment interact, and factors affecting it: employment of the resources of labour, capital, and land, currency inflation, economic growth, and public policies that have impact on glossary of economics, these elements. Other broad distinctions within economics include those between positive economics, desc ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bipartite Graph
In the mathematical field of graph theory, a bipartite graph (or bigraph) is a graph whose vertices can be divided into two disjoint and independent sets U and V, that is every edge connects a vertex in U to one in V. Vertex sets U and V are usually called the ''parts'' of the graph. Equivalently, a bipartite graph is a graph that does not contain any odd-length cycles. The two sets U and V may be thought of as a coloring of the graph with two colors: if one colors all nodes in U blue, and all nodes in V red, each edge has endpoints of differing colors, as is required in the graph coloring problem.. In contrast, such a coloring is impossible in the case of a non-bipartite graph, such as a triangle: after one node is colored blue and another red, the third vertex of the triangle is connected to vertices of both colors, preventing it from being assigned either color. One often writes G=(U,V,E) to denote a bipartite graph whose partition has the parts U and V, with E denoting ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Envy-free Matching
In economics and social choice theory, an envy-free matching (EFM) is a matching between people to "things", which is envy-free in the sense that no person would like to switch his "thing" with that of another person. This term has been used in several different contexts. In unweighted bipartite graphs In an unweighted bipartite graph G = (''X''+''Y'', ''E''), an envy-free matching is a matching in which no unmatched vertex in ''X'' is adjacent to a matched vertex in ''Y''. Suppose the vertices of ''X'' represent people, the vertices of ''Y'' represent houses, and an edge between a person ''x'' and a house ''y'' represents the fact that ''x'' is willing to live in ''y''. Then, an EFM is a partial allocation of houses to people such that each house-less person does not envy any person with a house, since he/she does not like any allocated house anyway. Every matching that saturates ''X'' is envy-free, and every empty matching is envy-free. Moreover, if , ''NG''(''X''), ≥ , X ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Rental Harmony
Rental harmony is a kind of a fair division problem in which indivisible items and a fixed monetary cost have to be divided simultaneously. The housemates problem and room-assignment-rent-division are alternative names to the same problem. In the typical setting, there are n partners who rent together an n-room house for cost fixed by the homeowner. Each housemate may have different preferences — one may prefer a large room, another may prefer a room with a view to the main road, etc. The following two problems should be solved simultaneously: * (a) Assign a room to each partner, * (b) Determine the amount each partner should pay, such that the sum of payments equals the fixed cost. There are several properties that we would like the assignment to satisfy. * Non-negativity (NN): all prices must be 0 or more: no partner should be paid to get a room. * Envy-freeness (EF): Given a pricing scheme (an assignment of rent to rooms), we say that a partner ''prefers'' a given room if he ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Fair Random Assignment
Fair random assignment (also called probabilistic one-sided matching) is a kind of a fair division problem. In an ''assignment problem'' (also called '' house-allocation problem'' or '' one-sided matching''), there ''m'' objects and they have to be allocated among ''n'' agents, such that each agent receives at most one object. Examples include the assignment of jobs to workers, rooms to housemates, dormitories to students, time-slots to users of a common machine, and so on. In general, a fair assignment may be impossible to attain. For example, if Alice and Batya both prefer the eastern room to the western room, only one of them will get it and the other will be envious. In the random assignment setting, fairness is attained using a lottery. So in the simple example above, Alice and Batya will toss a fair coin and the winner will get the eastern room. History Random assignment is mentioned already in the Bible: a lottery was used to allocate the lands of Canaan among the Tribes o ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Assignment Problem
The assignment problem is a fundamental combinatorial optimization problem. In its most general form, the problem is as follows: :The problem instance has a number of ''agents'' and a number of ''tasks''. Any agent can be assigned to perform any task, incurring some ''cost'' that may vary depending on the agent-task assignment. It is required to perform as many tasks as possible by assigning at most one agent to each task and at most one task to each agent, in such a way that the ''total cost'' of the assignment is minimized. Alternatively, describing the problem using graph theory: :The assignment problem consists of finding, in a weighted bipartite graph, a matching of a given size, in which the sum of weights of the edges is minimum. If the numbers of agents and tasks are equal, then the problem is called ''balanced assignment''. Otherwise, it is called ''unbalanced assignment''. If the total cost of the assignment for all tasks is equal to the sum of the costs for each agent ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Equitable Division
Equitable (EQ) cake-cutting is a kind of a fair cake-cutting problem, in which the fairness criterion is equitability. It is a cake-allocation in which the subjective value of all partners is the same, i.e., each partner is equally happy with his/her share. Mathematically, that means that for all partners and : :V_i(X_i) = V_j(X_j) Where: *X_i is the piece of cake allocated to partner ; *V_i is the value measure of partner . It is a real-valued function that, for every piece of cake, returns a number that represents the utility of partner from that piece. Usually these functions are normalized such that V_i(\emptyset)=0 and V_i(EntireCake)=1 for every . See the page on equitability for examples and comparison to other fairness criteria. Finding an equitable cake-cutting for two partners One cut - full revelation When there are 2 partners, it is possible to get an EQ division with a single cut, but it requires full knowledge of the partners' valuations. Assume that the cake ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Exact Cover
In the mathematical field of combinatorics, given a collection of subsets of a set , an exact cover is a subcollection of such that each element in is contained in ''exactly one'' subset in . In other words, is a partition of consisting of subsets contained in . One says that each element in is covered by exactly one subset in . An exact cover is a kind of cover. In computer science, the exact cover problem is a decision problem to determine if an exact cover exists. The exact cover problem is NP-complete This book is a classic, developing the theory, then cataloguing ''many'' NP-Complete problems. and is one of Karp's 21 NP-complete problems. It is NP-complete even when each subset in contains exactly three elements; this restricted problem is known as exact cover by 3-sets, often abbreviated X3C. The exact cover problem is a kind of constraint satisfaction problem. An exact cover problem can be represented by an incidence matrix or a bipartite graph. Knuth's Algorith ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Proportional Division
A proportional division is a kind of fair division in which a resource is divided among ''n'' partners with subjective valuations, giving each partner at least 1/''n'' of the resource by his/her own subjective valuation. Proportionality was the first fairness criterion studied in the literature; hence it is sometimes called "simple fair division". It was first conceived by Steinhaus. Example Consider a land asset that has to be divided among 3 heirs: Alice and Bob who think that it's worth 3 million dollars, and George who thinks that it's worth $4.5M. In a proportional division, Alice receives a land-plot that she believes to be worth at least $1M, Bob receives a land-plot that ''he'' believes to be worth at least $1M (even though Alice may think it is worth less), and George receives a land-plot that he believes to be worth at least $1.5M. Existence A proportional division does not always exist. For example, if the resource contains several indivisible items and the number ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Small Set Expansion Hypothesis
The small set expansion hypothesis or small set expansion conjecture in computational complexity theory is an unproven computational hardness assumption. Under the small set expansion hypothesis it is assumed to be computationally infeasible to distinguish between a certain class of expander graphs called "small set expanders" and other graphs that are very far from being small set expanders. This assumption implies the hardness of several other computational problems, and the optimality of certain known approximation algorithms. The small set expansion hypothesis is related to the unique games conjecture, another unproven computational hardness assumption according to which accurately approximating the value of certain games is computationally infeasible. If the small set expansion hypothesis is true, then so is the unique games conjecture. Background The ''edge expansion'' of a set X of vertices in a graph G is defined as \frac, where the vertical bars denote the number of el ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Social Network
A social network is a social structure made up of a set of social actors (such as individuals or organizations), sets of dyadic ties, and other social interactions between actors. The social network perspective provides a set of methods for analyzing the structure of whole social entities as well as a variety of theories explaining the patterns observed in these structures. The study of these structures uses social network analysis to identify local and global patterns, locate influential entities, and examine network dynamics. Social networks and the analysis of them is an inherently interdisciplinary academic field which emerged from social psychology, sociology, statistics, and graph theory. Georg Simmel authored early structural theories in sociology emphasizing the dynamics of triads and "web of group affiliations". Jacob Moreno is credited with developing the first sociograms in the 1930s to study interpersonal relationships. These approaches were mathematically formalize ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Hall Violator
In graph theory, a Hall violator is a set of vertices in a graph, that violate the condition to Hall's marriage theorem. Formally, given a bipartite graph , a Hall-violator in is a subset of , for which , where is the set of neighbors of in . If is a Hall violator, then there is no matching that saturates all vertices of . Therefore, there is also no matching that saturates . Hall's marriage theorem says that the opposite is also true: if there is no Hall violator, then there exists a matching that saturates . Algorithms Finding a Hall violator A Hall violator can be found by an efficient algorithm. The algorithm below uses the following terms: * An ''-alternating path'', for some matching , is a path in which the first edge is not an edge of , the second edge is of , the third is not of , etc. * A vertex is ''-reachable'' from some vertex , if there is an -alternating path from to . As an example, consider the figure at the right, where the vertical (blue ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
