A simply exponential upper bound on the maximum number of stable matchings

Abstract

Stable matching is a classical combinatorial problem that has been the subject of intense theoretical and empirical study since its introduction in 1962 in a seminal paper by Gale and Shapley. In this paper, we provide a new upper bound on f(n), the maximum number of stable matchings that a stable matching instance with n men and n women can have. It has been a long-standing open problem to understand the asymptotic behavior of f(n) as n→∞, first posed by Donald Knuth in the 1970s. Until now the best lower bound was approximately 2.28n, and the best upper bound was 2nlogn− O(n). In this paper, we show that for all n, f(n) ≤ cn for some universal constant c. This matches the lower bound up to the base of the exponent. Our proof is based on a reduction to counting the number of downsets of a family of posets that we call “mixing”. The latter might be of independent interest.