Marriage Formation with Randomor Assortative Meeting

Elena Parilina () and Alessandro Tampieri

Working Papers - Economics from Universita' degli Studi di Firenze, Dipartimento di Scienze per l'Economia e l'Impresa

Abstract: In this paper, we study marriage formation in an optimal stopping problem where meetings can be of two types: one in which individuals meet potential partners randomly, and one ("assortative") in which the meeting occurs between individuals with similar characteristics. The presence of assortative meetings influences the expectations of the quality of potential spouses, and in turn the marriage choice. We show that individuals of high rank tend to be pickier in their marriage hunting. This does not necessarily mean that they marry later than other individuals, since the higher expected quality of their potential partners can make them marry earlier than individuals with a lower universal characteristic. In particular, individuals with medium rank tend to marry later than the other types, since they are picky but the quality of their potential partners is usually lower than for high-rank individuals.

Keywords: secretary problem; mate choice; random meeting; assortative meeting (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C73 C78 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 45 pages
Date: 2019
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mic
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.disei.unifi.it/upload/sub/pubblicazioni/repec/pdf/wp04_2019.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:frz:wpaper:wp2019_04.rdf

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers - Economics from Universita' degli Studi di Firenze, Dipartimento di Scienze per l'Economia e l'Impresa Via delle Pandette 9 50127 - Firenze - Italy. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Giorgio Ricchiuti ().