2025/05/27 by José F. Rodrı́guez, Rodríguez, José, David F. Manlove +1
Decision Sciences · Economics, Econometrics and Finance · #Auction Theory and Applications #Banking stability, regulation, efficiency #Data Structures and Algorithms (cs.DS) #FOS: Computer and information sciences
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2505.21229
openalex publication_date 2025/05/27 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
In the \sc Course Allocation problem, there are a set of students and a set of courses at a given university. University courses may have different numbers of credits, typically related to different numbers of learning hours, and there may be other constraints such as courses running concurrently. Our goal is to allocate the students to the courses such that the resulting matching is stable, which means that no student and course(s) have an incentive to break away from the matching and become assigned to one another. We study several definitions of stability and for each we give a mixture of polynomial-time algorithms and hardness results for problems involving verifying the stability of a matching, finding a stable matching or determining that none exists, and finding a maximum size stable matching. We also study variants of the problem with master lists of students, and lower quotas on the number of students allocated to a course, establishing additional complexity results in these settings.