Affinely representable lattices, stable matchings, and choice functions

Birkhoff’s representation theorem (Birkhoff, Duke Math J 3(3):443–454, 1937) defines a bijection between elements of a distributive lattice and the family of upper sets of an associated poset. Although not used explicitly, this result is at the backbone of the combinatorial algorithm by Irving et al. (J ACM 34(3):532-543, 1987) for maximizing a linear function over the set of stable matchings in Gale and Shapley’s stable marriage model (Gale and Shapley, Am Math Monthly 69(1):9–15 1962). In this paper, we introduce a property of distributive lattices, which we term as affine representability, and show its role in efficiently solving linear optimization problems over the elements of a distributive lattice, as well as describing the convex hull of the characteristic vectors of the lattice elements. We apply this concept to the stable matching model with path-independent quota-filling choice functions, thus giving efficient algorithms and a compact polyhedral description for this model. To the best of our knowledge, this model generalizes all those for which similar results were known, and our paper is the first that proposes efficient algorithms for stable matchings with choice functions, beyond classical extensions of the Deferred Acceptance algorithm.