An undirected graph (Formula presented.) is stable if the cardinality of a maximum matching equals the size of a minimum fractional vertex cover. We call a set of edges (Formula presented.) a stabilizer if its removal from (Formula presented.) yields a stable graph. In this paper we study the following natural edge-deletion question: given a graph (Formula presented.), can we find a minimum-cardinality stabilizer? Stable graphs play an important role in cooperative game theory. In the classic matching game introduced by Shapley and Shubik (Int J Game Theory 1(1):111–130, 1971) we are given an undirected graph (Formula presented.) where vertices represent players, and we define the value of each subset (Formula presented.) as the cardinality of a maximum matching in the subgraph induced by (Formula presented.). The core of such a game contains all fair allocations of the value of $$V$$V among the players, and is well-known to be non-empty iff graph $$G$$G is stable. The stabilizer problem addresses the question of how to modify the graph to ensure that the core is non-empty. We show that this problem is vertex-cover hard. We prove that every minimum-cardinality stabilizer avoids some maximum matching of $$G$$G. We use this insight to give efficient approximation algorithms for sparse graphs and for regular graphs.

Finding small stabilizers for unstable graphs

Sanità, Laura
2015

Abstract

An undirected graph (Formula presented.) is stable if the cardinality of a maximum matching equals the size of a minimum fractional vertex cover. We call a set of edges (Formula presented.) a stabilizer if its removal from (Formula presented.) yields a stable graph. In this paper we study the following natural edge-deletion question: given a graph (Formula presented.), can we find a minimum-cardinality stabilizer? Stable graphs play an important role in cooperative game theory. In the classic matching game introduced by Shapley and Shubik (Int J Game Theory 1(1):111–130, 1971) we are given an undirected graph (Formula presented.) where vertices represent players, and we define the value of each subset (Formula presented.) as the cardinality of a maximum matching in the subgraph induced by (Formula presented.). The core of such a game contains all fair allocations of the value of $$V$$V among the players, and is well-known to be non-empty iff graph $$G$$G is stable. The stabilizer problem addresses the question of how to modify the graph to ensure that the core is non-empty. We show that this problem is vertex-cover hard. We prove that every minimum-cardinality stabilizer avoids some maximum matching of $$G$$G. We use this insight to give efficient approximation algorithms for sparse graphs and for regular graphs.
2015
2014
Bock, Adrian; Chandrasekaran, Karthekeyan; Konemann, Jochen; Peis, Britta; Sanità, Laura
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Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/11565/4063840
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