Truthful and Stable One-sided Matching on Networks (2201.05787v4)

Abstract: Mechanism design on social networks is a hot research direction recently, and we have seen many interesting results in auctions and matching. Compared to the traditional settings, the new goal of the network settings is that we need to design incentives to incentivize the participants of the game to invite their neighbors on the network to join the game. This is challenging because they are competing for something (e.g., resources or matches) in the game. In one-sided matching, especially house exchange, the well-known unique truthful, stable and optimal solution called Top Trading Cycle (TTC) cannot achieve the new goal. Existing works have tried to add constraints on TTC to obtain the incentive, but it only works in trees and it does not guarantee any stability. In this paper, we move this forward and propose the first mechanism called Leave and Share (LS) which not only achieves the goal in all networks but also gives the most stable solution in the new settings. In terms of optimality, as it is impossible to achieve it in any network, we conduct simulations to compare it with the extensions of TTC.