The NTU Partitioned Matching Game for International Kidney Exchange Programs

TL;DR

This paper models international kidney exchange programs as a non-transferable utility matching game, analyzing the core's stability and computational complexity, with results on existence and optimization under various conditions.

Contribution

It introduces the NTU variant of the partitioned matching game for IKEP, analyzing core stability and complexity, including polynomial-time solutions for specific cases.

Findings

Weak core always nonempty when each player has two vertices

Strong core existence is polynomial-time decidable with two vertices per player

Deciding strong core emptiness is NP-hard with three vertices per player

Abstract

Motivated by the real-world problem of international kidney exchange (IKEP), recent literature introduced a generalized transferable utility matching game featuring a partition of the vertex set of a graph into players, and analyzed its complexity. We explore the non-transferable utility (NTU) variant of the game, where the utility of players is given by the number of their matched vertices. Our motivation for studying this problem is twofold. First, the NTU version is arguably a more natural model of the international kidney exchange program, as the utility of a participating country mostly depends on how many of its patients receive a kidney, which is non-transferable by nature. Second, the special case where each player has two vertices, which we call the NTU matching game with couples, is interesting in its own right and has intriguing structural properties. We study the core of the NTU game, which suitably captures the notion of stability of an IKEP, as it precludes incentives to deviate from the proposed solution for any possible coalition of the players. We prove computational complexity results about the weak and strong cores under various assumptions on the players. In particular, we show that if every player has two vertices, then the weak core is always nonempty, and the existence of a strong core solution can be decided in polynomial time. Moreover, one can efficiently optimize on the strong core. In contrast, it is NP-hard to decide whether the strong core is empty when each player has three vertices. We also show that if the number of players is constant, then the non-emptiness of the weak and strong cores is polynomial-time decidable, and we can find a minimum-cost core solution in polynomial time.