Benefits of marriage as a search strategy
Davi B. Costa

TL;DR
This paper models marriage as a stochastic search process, showing that strategic stopping rules can improve average utility and suggesting that centralized matching could outperform individual search in large societies.
Contribution
It introduces a stochastic model of mate searching with decision rules, demonstrating benefits of marriage and comparing outcomes with stable matchings like Gale-Shapley.
Findings
Marriage can increase average utility compared to no marriage.
Optimal stopping rules involve marrying when partner preference exceeds a threshold.
Model's predictions align well with real-world data on marriage rates.
Abstract
We propose and investigate a model for mate searching and marriage in large societies based on a stochastic matching process and simple decision rules. Agents have preferences among themselves given by some probability distribution. They randomly search for better mates, forming new couples and breaking apart in the process. Marriage is implemented in the model by adding the decision of stopping searching for a better mate when the affinity between a couple is higher than a certain fixed amount. We show that the average utility in the system with marriage can be higher than in the system without it. Part of our results can be summarized in what sounds like a piece of advice: don't marry the first person you like and don't search for the love of your life, but get married if you like your partner more than a sigma above average. We also find that the average utility attained in our…
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Taxonomy
TopicsDiffusion and Search Dynamics · Evolutionary Game Theory and Cooperation · Evolutionary Psychology and Human Behavior
