The company built around the marriage pact is now offering matchmaking tools to the public: Matchbox.
"Matchbox is the matching algorithm behind your next great event.
"We know how to make great matches, but the event is yours—decide who to invite, where to host, and when.
"We’ll give you everything you need to run the matching algorithm."
Looking for a date, a marriage, a business partner? Stanford might have the right app for you.
Here's the story from the Stanford Daily
Match, Marry, Capitalize? A catalog of Stanford’s matchmaking services, By Oriana Riley
"Here’s how matchmakers have attempted to help the Stanford community find love, friendships and business partners.
Perhaps the most famous Stanford matchmaking service, Marriage Pact, originated as a final project for a Stanford economics project. The annual service, which uses a survey to match compatible individuals for friendships and romantic relationships, has expanded to 88 campuses and more than 400,000 people.
...
"Founder Pact
"Founder Pact presented an opportunity for students to try their hand not at love, but entrepreneurship. Founder Pact, created by the Business Association of Stanford Entrepreneurial Students (BASES), aimed to match entrepreneurs to realize their business ideas together.
"The Founder Pact form, however, is now closed.
"Wing
"A baby bird on the Stanford dating scene is Wing, announced to Stanford students via email on April 18. According to the email, Wing is built on the idea of “set[ting] up your friends.”
Two related stories caught my eye this week. One lamented the difficulty of making a meaningful match through online dating, and thought about what is lost from the older (but less mobile) tradition of matchmaking by family, friends, and even professional matchmakers. The other concerns a newish internet tool that is meant to help people introspect about what is important to them, and match accordingly.
Here's the first, from a NYT opinion piece:
Dating Is Broken. Going Retro Could Fix It. By Michal Leibowitz
"There are elements of traditional dating culture that can provide solutions not just to the way we find people to date but also to the way we navigate relationships. Through conversations with traditional and secular daters, I’ve come to see three practices as particularly promising for people who are looking for committed, long-term relationships: meeting partners through friends, family or matchmakers rather than online; early, upfront communication around long-term goals and values; and delaying sexual intimacy.
"It’s worth asking: Is it time to court again?"
********
And here's an article from the Stanford Daily, about the continuing evolution of the Marriage Pact, which began as a very popular once-a-year matching event at Stanford, spread to other campuses, and is now seeking a place in the set of modern relationship tools:
Marriage Pact secures $5 million in seed funding. By Matthew Turk
"Marriage Pact, a research-based matchmaking company founded at Stanford, received $5 million in seed funding from Bain Capital Ventures and other investors. The money could scale the platform considerably, potentially leading to a larger user base and new relationship technology.
...
The Marriage Pact releases an annual survey for college students with around 50 questions designed to capture their personal convictions and life philosophy. Marriage Pact’s software then algorithmically pairs respondents to maximize their compatibility.
...
"The Marriage Pact survey and matchmaking “will always be free” but paid additions to the existing services are in development, McGregor wrote to The Daily. “Ultimately, we’re building a transformative startup in social tech. We’ll get there by designing further experiences that create so much value in your life that they’re worth paying for,” he wrote.
"Until 2018, the software behind the matching optimization was based on the deferred-acceptance algorithm. Now, the algorithm is proprietary"
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Related earlier post:
Here's a recent working paper about college and marriage in Norway:
College as a Marriage Market, by Lars Kirkebøen, Edwin Leuven, Magne Mogstad
Abstract: Recent descriptive work suggests the type of college education (field or institution) is an important but neglected pathway through which individuals sort into homogeneous marriages. These descriptive studies raise the question of why college graduates are so likely to marry someone within their own institution or field of study. One possible explanation is that individuals match on traits correlated with the choice of education, such as innate ability, tastes or family environment. Another possible explanation is that the choice of college education causally impacts whether and whom one marries, either because of search frictions or preferences for spousal education. The goal of this paper is to sort out these explanations and, by doing so, examine the role of colleges as marriage markets. Using data from Norway to address key identification and measurement challenges, we find that colleges are local marriage markets, mattering greatly for whom one marries, not because of the pre-determined traits of the admitted students but as a direct result of attending a particular institution at a given time.
Here's a summary from the Becker-Friedman Institute:
College as a Marriage Market, by Larn Kirkebøen, Edwin Leuven, Magne Mogstad
"The context of the authors’ study is Norway’s postsecondary education system. The centralized admission process and the rich nationwide data allow them to observe not only people’s choice of college education (institution and field) and workplace, but also if and who they marry (or cohabit with), and to credibly study effects of college enrollment. The authors find the following:
"The type of postsecondary education is empirically important in explaining whom but not whether one marries.
"Enrolling in a particular institution makes it much more likely to marry someone from that institution. These effects are especially large if individuals overlapped in college, are sizable even for those who studied a different field and are not driven by geography.
"Enrolling in a particular field increases the chances of marrying someone within the field but only insofar as the individuals attended the same institution. Enrolling in a field makes it no more likely to marry someone from other institutions with the same field.
The effects of enrollment on educational homogamy (or marriage between people from similar backgrounds) and assortativity vary systematically across fields and institutions, and tend to larger in more selective and higher paying fields and institutions.
Only a small part of the effect of enrollment on educational homogamy can be attributed to matches within the same workplace.
Lastly, the effects on the probability of marrying someone within their institution and field vary systematically with cohort-to-cohort variation in sex ratios within institutions and fields. This finding is at odds with the assumption in canonical matching models of large and frictionless marriage markets.
Taken together, these findings suggests that colleges are effectively local marriage markets, mattering greatly for the whom one marries, not because of the pre-determined traits of the students that are admitted but as a direct result of attending a particular institution at a given time."
Marriage is not the only way that people can romantically partner, and of course young people are the pioneers in many new forms of household formation. But here are two news stories that say Living Together Apart (LAT) relationships are growing among older and often previously married couples.
The NY Times has a story focusing on older couples:
Older Singles Have Found a New Way to Partner Up: Living Apart. Fearing that a romantic attachment in later life will lead to full-time caregiving, many couples are choosing commitment without sharing a home. By Francine Russo
"With greater longevity, the doubling of the divorce rate since the 1990s for people over 50 and evolving social norms, older people like Ms. Randall are increasingly re-partnering in various forms. Cohabitation, for example, is more often replacing remarriage following divorce or widowhood, said Susan L. Brown, a sociologist at Bowling Green State University in Ohio.
...
"As researchers study those who do partner, however, they find that increasing numbers are choosing a kind of relationship known as LAT (rhymes with cat), for “living apart together.” These are long-term committed romantic relationships without sharing (or intending to share) a home.
"“A big attraction of LAT is to avoid the potential responsibility of being a full-time caregiver,” said Ingrid Arnet Connidis, an emerita sociology professor at Western University in London, Ontario. “Women cared for their children, parents and spouse, and want to avoid getting into these traditional gender roles.”
"While researchers have not yet delved deeply into the demographics of those in LAT relationships, anecdotally it seems to be more prevalent among those at high enough socioeconomic levels to be able to maintain separate households. In general, there is evidence that wealthier people who are single later in life are more likely to re-partner."
*************
The WSJ has a story focusing on new couples in the midst of raising kids:
The Secret to These Successful Marriages? Living Apart. The number of married couples who live apart is small but growing. Here’s how they say the arrangement helps their families and their relationships By Clare Ansberry
"Many couples who live apart have been married before and don’t want to uproot their children from homes, schools and friends, or can’t because of joint-custody arrangements.
...
"The number of married people living apart, which includes military couples, is still small but rose 4.8% in the last decade to 3.6 million, according to figures from the Census Bureau."
Dating sites are often congested, with many of them having more men than women. Here's an analysis suggesting that there are efficiency gains to having the short side of the market (in this case the women) do most of the search, by requiring them to initiate contact...
Facilitating the Search for Partners on Matching Platforms by Yash Kanoria , Daniela Saban, Management Science, Published Online:19 May 2021 https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2020.3794
Abstract: Two-sided matching platforms can control and optimize over many aspects of the search for partners. To understand how matching platforms should be designed, we introduce a dynamic two-sided search model with strategic agents who must bear a cost to discover their value for each potential partner and can do so nonsimultaneously. We characterize evolutionarily stable stationary equilibria and find that, in many settings, the platform can mitigate wasted search effort by imposing suitable restrictions on agents. In unbalanced markets, the platform should force the short side of the market to initiate contact with potential partners, by disallowing the long side from doing so. This allows the agents on the long side to exercise more choice in equilibrium. When agents are vertically differentiated, the platform can significantly improve welfare even in the limit of vanishing screening costs by forcing the shorter side of the market to propose and by hiding information about the quality of potential partners. Furthermore, a Pareto improvement in welfare is possible in this limit.
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Earlier:
The French economic sociologist Philippe Steiner, who studies (among other things) how markets and gift giving can coexist, has a short piece about dating platforms.
Via google translate:
"Two elements can serve to close this brief reflection on the meeting of economic sociology and the sociology of sexuality.
"The appearance of a commercial intermediary modifies the social conditions of the romantic encounter. However, is it of a commercial nature? The use of the term matrimonial market, in which it is a question of "making a choice, maximizing your options and using calculation techniques in terms of costs and profits, and efficiency" [Illouz, 2006, p. 252], might lead one to believe. This interpretation is doubtful: if the market implies the idea of choice, the converse is not true. The market relationship is characterized by monetary power, that is, the ability to obtain the desired good by paying more - it is not for nothing that auction technology is often taken as the example of the market. Also, once the relationship connecting individuals to the platform has brought together two potential partners, it is not the ability to pay that will make the match between them."
...
"Finally, the matching technologies that are at work in the platforms are not necessarily associated with the market world [Steiner, 2016, chap. 7]. Matching platforms using deferred acceptance or optimal trading cycle technologies can serve as well to reproduce the market functioning as to enable non-market matches. Alvin Roth's economic engineering applies to the labor market (pairing of medical interns and hospitals) as well as to organ transplantation, in which the commercial relationship is banned by national laws as well as by international declarations of professionals."
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The following interview may also be of interest to readers of this blog:
“Organic” Gift-Giving and Organ Transplantation, the Development of Economic Sociology and Morality in a Super-Monetized World: An Interview with Philippe Steiner, Journal of Economic Sociology, 2014, vol. 15, issue 1, 11-19
"when I studied the issue of organ transplantation, in full agreement with Healy’s approach, the organizational setting appeared to be very, very important. Accordingly, organ donation is a gift that individual actors provide to organizational actors. And then, with this gift, the organization conducts an extensive and very important process to ensure that the kidney does not convey illness, AIDS, cancer. In addition, the degree of compatibility between the organ and the body is checked. And they do this very rapidly. Then, they allocate the gift to a new individual actor. However, the important thing, in my opinion, is that between the first individual actor and the second one there is a large organization. More precisely, a plurality of organizations. This is something that I refer to in my present book as organizational gift-giving”. To parallel the Durkheimian distinction between mechanical and organic solidarity, I would call this “organic” gift-giving and thus draw a distinction between the usual story about people in Melanesia who give gifts according to Malinowski and Mauss.
...
" I am trying to map gift-giving, inheritance, and the exchange of symbolic goods, which are at the frontiers of usual market exchanges, to provide a broad view of what exchange at large means in our present society. Considering market exchange as a limited element of all the transactions in the world is my way to escape this super-monetized world.
...
"Social forces are pushing in the direction of a fullblown market society, whereas others are resisting and devoting their energy to maintaining a frontier between market exchanges and other forms of exchange. In that sense, political issues remain central, as in Polanyi’s time. To return to my research on organ transplantation, I would like to stress that the last chapter of the book concerns what is usually referred to as transplant tourism — is it good to have transplant tourism? Should it be fully legalized? Is the creation of a biomarket in India for Americans suffering from final-stage kidney failure a good thing? You must say yes or no. You cannot escape a political decision. And my answer was “Definitely, no biomarkets”. However, of course, this is not an easy position because as you know there are individuals who are dying because of the lack of kidneys. Therefore, this (response) is uncertain, difficult. However, in the end, not giving an answer is a boon to those pushing for the commodification of body parts. So, finally, I decided to stay on the Maussian–Polanyian side — “limit the market.”
The datng site OK Cupid regularly surveys its users, and have just published a summary of recent results:
The Future of Dating--OkCupid Data Predicts 8 Dating Trends Singles Can Expect from 2021
Perhaps the most predictable of the 8 trends they note is this one:
"More than 2 million people answered our question “Do you prefer that your date shares your political views?” with 64% of respondents agreeing: cross-party dating does not work in modern relationships. In 2021, we’re going to see more people are refusing to date outside party lines. Around the world, 5 million daters answered our question “Could you date someone who has strong political opinions that are the exact opposite of yours?”, and there’s been an upward trend in people refusing to date across party lines. In 2019, 53% of respondents said they couldn’t date someone whose political views were the opposite of theirs — and that ratio jumped to 60% in 2020."
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