Stable Marriage and Roommates problems with restricted edges: Complexity and approximability

Our main theorems prove that for the (bipartite) Stable Marriage problem, case (1) leads to NP-hardness and inapproximability results, whilst case (2) can be solved in polynomial time. For non-bipartite Stable Roommates instances, case (2) yields an NP-hard but (under some cardinality assumptions) 2-approximable problem. In the case of NP-hard problems, we also discuss polynomially solvable special cases, arising from restrictions on the lengths of the preference lists, or upper bounds on the numbers of restricted pairs.