Marriage through friends

TL;DR

This paper presents a model of the marriage market where individuals meet partners directly or via friends, explaining shifts in marriage patterns and the impact of online dating on socialization and meeting methods.

Contribution

It introduces a novel model linking direct and friend-based meetings, accounting for socialization investment and explaining recent trends in marriage formation.

Findings

Higher direct meeting rates increase friend-based meetings when socialization is exogenous.

Investment in socialization causes a non-monotonic relationship with friend meetings.

The model explains the decline of marriages through friends with the rise of online dating.

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a model of the marriage market in which individuals meet potential partners either directly or through their friends. When socialization is exogenous, a higher arrival rate of direct meetings also implies more meetings through friends. When individuals decide how much to invest in socialization, meetings through friends are first increasing and then decreasing in the arrival rate of direct offers. Hence, our model can rationalize the negative correlation between the advent of online dating and the decrease of marriages through friends observed in the US over the past decades.