Score: 0

Rawlsian many-to-one matching with non-linear utility

Published: November 4, 2025 | arXiv ID: 2511.02533v1

By: Hortence Nana, Andreas Athanasopoulos, Christos Dimitrakakis

Potential Business Impact:

Finds fair ways to pick students for colleges.

Business Areas:
Employment Professional Services

We study a many-to-one matching problem, such as the college admission problem, where each college can admit multiple students. Unlike classical models, colleges evaluate sets of students through non-linear utility functions that capture diversity between them. In this setting, we show that classical stable matchings may fail to exist. To address this, we propose alternative solution concepts based on Rawlsian fairness, aiming to maximize the minimum utility across colleges. We design both deterministic and stochastic algorithms that iteratively improve the outcome of the worst-off college, offering a practical approach to fair allocation when stability cannot be guaranteed.

Country of Origin
🇨🇭 Switzerland

Page Count
17 pages

Category
Computer Science:
Machine Learning (CS)