BY: AMITRAJEET A. BATABYAL
Rochester Institute of Technology
Dept. of Economics
HAMID BELADI
University of Dayton
Department of Economics and Finance
Document: Available from the SSRN Electronic Paper Collection:
http://papers.ssrn.com/paper.taf?abstract_id=312152
Contact: AMITRAJEET A. BATABYAL
Email: Mailto:aabgsh at rit.edu
Postal: Rochester Institute of Technology
Dept. of Economics
92 Lomb Memorial Drive
Rochester, NY 14623-5604 UNITED STATES
Phone: 585-475-2805
Fax: 585-475-5777; 585-475-7120
Co-Auth: HAMID BELADI
Email: Mailto:beladi at udayton.edu
Postal: University of Dayton
Department of Economics and Finance
School of Business Administration
300 College Park
Dayton, OH 45469-2241 UNITED STATES
ABSTRACT:
Although arranged and love marriages have been around for a long
time, to the best of our knowledge, there are no comparative
analyses in the economics literature of the relative merits of
one or the other kind of marriage. As such, the purpose of this
note is to conduct a theoretical inquiry into the desirability
of arranged versus love marriages. We analyze a simple model of
decision making in a dynamic and stochastic setting and show
that the decision to have an arranged or a love marriage depends
on a comparison of the expected amount of time it takes the
agent's well-wishers to find a spouse with the expected total
time it takes this agent to find a spouse by himself or herself.
Keywords: Arranged Marriage, Love Marriage, Optimal Decision
Rule, Dynamics, Uncertainty