Many-to-many matching: stable polyandrous polygamy (or polygamous polyandry)

The major results known for the marriage and university admissions problems - the one-to-one and-many-to-one stable matching problems - are shown to: have equivalents in the general many-to-many setting. Some of these results depend upon a particular, natural definition of individual preferences ove r sets of mates: notably, characterizations of "optimal" stable assignments in terms of "efficiency", "monotonicity", and "strategy-proofness". (C) 20 00 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.