Online Roommate Allocation Problem

Abstract

We study the online allocation problem under a roommate market model introduced in [Chan et al., 2016]. Consider a fixed supply of n rooms and a list of 2n applicants arriving sequentially in an online fashion. The problem is to assign a room to each person upon her arrival, such that after the algorithm terminates, each room is shared by exactly two people. We focus on two objectives: (1) maximizing the social welfare, which is defined as the sum of valuations that applicants have for their rooms, plus the happiness value between each pair of roommates; (2) the allocation should satisfy certain stability conditions, such that no group of people would be willing to switch roommates or rooms. We first show a polynomial-time online algorithm that achieves constant competitive ratio for social welfare maximization. We then extend it to the case where each room is assigned to c > 2 people, and achieve a competitive ratio of Ω(1/c^2). Finally, we show both positive and negative results in satisfying different stability conditions in this online setting.