Comments on: Modeling the Dating/Marriage market

Question: Modeling the Dating/Marriage market

sk381 — Mon, 16 Jan 2006 02:09:08 -0800

Dating/Marriage market and game theory

I'm looking for online papers, journal articles, websites etc. that try and model/study the dating/marriage market from a game theory or similarly mathematical point of view. Any suggestions?

By: vacapinta

vacapinta — Mon, 16 Jan 2006 02:22:16 -0800

Some of this is covered lightly in a book called Mathematics and Sex

You might also want to look into what is known as the Sultan's Dowry problem. (Replace "highest dowry" with "best mate")

See also the comments on this post on Modal Wives.

By: caek

caek — Mon, 16 Jan 2006 04:53:09 -0800

This article on the stopping problem may be of interest: Mathematics, marriage and finding somewhere to eat.

By: Gortuk

Gortuk — Mon, 16 Jan 2006 05:02:22 -0800

Matt Ridley's The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature is a fun pop-science read along those lines.

By: Space Coyote

Space Coyote — Mon, 16 Jan 2006 05:31:21 -0800

this mefi post had a cool graph showing the couplings of high school students.

By: ROU_Xenophobe

ROU_Xenophobe — Mon, 16 Jan 2006 07:10:02 -0800

No direct suggestion, but I'd guess that you could model the dating scene as a fairly straightforward application of a signaling model or beer-quiche game, so you might find it useful to include those or related terms when you're searching.

By: cushie

cushie — Mon, 16 Jan 2006 08:31:33 -0800

For more economic persepctives, try searches for assortative mating and marriage market. From your question it looks like you are interested in theoretical models (in theory how would we calculate who to marry). There is a lot of empirical work on this (applied, rather than theoretical) looking at data to see who we actually marry, and seeing what patterns/trends exist.
See for example: Marrying Your Mom which argues that men marry women roughly like their mothers, in terms of socio-economic status and education.

By: ph00dz

ph00dz — Mon, 16 Jan 2006 08:32:08 -0800

There was kind of an interesting post on marginal revolution about modal wives -- the number of potential life mates that you could have under the right circumstances.

A good jumping off point for research, maybe?

By: mbrubeck

mbrubeck — Mon, 16 Jan 2006 08:46:02 -0800

The economist David D. Friedman has a well-written chapter about this topic in his book Hidden Order. He includes much of the same material but with a focus on marriage and family law in his book Law's Order which is free to read online (see chapter 13).

By: GarageWine

GarageWine — Mon, 16 Jan 2006 09:56:18 -0800

The seminal article is Becker, Gary. "A Theory of Marriage" in The Economic Approach to Human Behavior. University of Chicago Press. 1976. (Amazon | Barnes & Noble)

The first part of the article compares the benefits/cost of being married or single for one man and one woman. The second part considers how a group of men and women sort themselves into couples. The second part is considered by many economists to be a very important economic "discovery" with many applications to everyday observations.

By: Gable Oak

Gable Oak — Mon, 16 Jan 2006 10:59:24 -0800

I was always amused by this Game Theory analysis of Valentine's Day by James Miller.

By: scodger

scodger — Mon, 16 Jan 2006 20:31:02 -0800

The journal of theoretical biology regularly has articles about this kind of stuff. For example, there is this, although you may need a login, and they are pretty technical.
A search of pubmed for "marriage" and "game" and so on turns up some interesting results, as would google scholar.