OFFSET
1,2
COMMENTS
The members of such a pair of people are called outcasts. The outcasts must be matched with each other in any stable matching independently of how they rank each other.
For n other than 2, there can be at most one pair of outcasts.
The number of profiles where the pair of outcasts exists and they rank each other last is A343474(n).
LINKS
Michael De Vlieger, Table of n, a(n) for n = 1..23
Matvey Borodin, Eric Chen, Aidan Duncan, Tanya Khovanova, Boyan Litchev, Jiahe Liu, Veronika Moroz, Matthew Qian, Rohith Raghavan, Garima Rastogi, and Michael Voigt, Sequences of the Stable Matching Problem, arXiv:2201.00645 [math.HO], 2021.
FORMULA
a(n) = n^4*(n-1)!^(2n) for n != 2; a(2) = 14.
EXAMPLE
Each person makes a ranking list for all members of the opposite gender without ties. The outcasts are ranked n-th (last) by at least n-1 persons of the opposite gender. This is why for n>2 at most one pair of outcasts can exist.
For n>2, we have n^2 ways to pick the two outcasts, then n!^2 ways to complete the outcasts' preference profiles, and finally (n-1)!^(2n-2) ways to complete everyone else's profiles.
MATHEMATICA
{1, 14}~Join~Table[n^4 (n - 1)!^(2 n), {n, 3, 10}] (* corrected by Michael De Vlieger, Feb 11 2022 *)
CROSSREFS
KEYWORD
nonn
AUTHOR
Tanya Khovanova and MIT PRIMES STEP Senior group, May 30 2021
STATUS
approved