Beauty and distance in the stable marriage problem

The stable marriage problem has been introduced in order to describe a comp lex system where individuals attempt to optimise their own satisfaction, su bject to mutually conflicting constraints. Due to the potential large appli cability of such model to describe all the situation where different object s has to be matched pairwise, the statistical properties of this model have been extensively studied. In this paper, we present a generalisation of th is model, introduced in order to take into account the presence of correlat ions in the lists and the effects of distance when the players are supposed to be represented by a position in space. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. A ll rights reserved.