New conference paper, co-authored by Gergely Csáji in Proceedings Symposium on Simplicity in Algorithms (SOSA)

The Stable Marriage problem (SM), solved by the famous deferred acceptance algorithm of Gale and Shapley (GS), has many natural generalizations. If we allow ties in preferences, then the problem of finding a maximum solution becomes NP-hard, and the best known approximation ratio is 1.5 (McDermid ICALP 2009, Paluch WAOA 2011, Z. Kiraly MATCH-UP 2012), achievable by running GS on a cleverly constructed modified instance. Another elegant generalization of SM is the matroid kernel problem introduced by Fleiner (IPCO 2001), which is solvable in polynomial time using an abstract matroidal version of GS. Our main result is a simple 1.5-approximation algorithm for the matroid kernel problem with ties. We also show that the algorithm works for several other versions of stability defined for cardinal preferences, by appropriately modifying the instance on which GS is executed. The latter results are new even for the stable marriage setting.