The stable marriage problem (SM) has a wide variety of practical applications, ranging from matching resident doctors to hospitals, to matching students to schools, or more generally to any two-sided market. In the classical formulation, n men and n women express their preferences over the members of the other sex. Solving an SM means finding a stable marriage: a matching of men to women with no blocking pair. A blocking pair consists of a man and a woman who are not married to each other but both prefer each other to their partners. It is possible to find a male-optimal (resp., female-optimal) stable marriage in polynomial time. However, it is sometimes desirable to find stable marriages without favoring a group at the expenses of the other one. In this paper we present a local search approach to find stable marriages. Our experiments show that the number of steps grows as little as O(nlog(n)). We also show empirically that the proposed algorithm samples very well the set of all stable marriages of a given SM, thus providing a fair and efficient approach to generate stable marriages.
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