Breadwinner wives

In his NY Times column, Dick Thaler writes about the "interesting new paper by Marianne Bertrand, Emir Kamenica and Jessica Pan, three economists who are colleagues of mine at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business. They found that traditional views of gender identity, particularly the view that the right and proper role of the husband is to make more money than the wife, are affecting choices of whom to marry, how much to work, and even whether to stay married."

 He ends with this:
"But now back to the notion of couples’ contentment: Is there any way to tell whether it’s the wife or the husband who becomes unhappy when the wife earns more? Does he think that she is threatening his manliness, or does she think that he’s a slacker?

That may be impossible to answer, partly because of something I learned long ago from Alvin E. Roth, a Nobel laureate in economics last year. I call it Roth’s rule: In equilibrium, it’s impossible for you to be happier than your spouse.

If you and your spouse both understand that rule, you’re both likely to be happier — regardless of how much money either of you make."

Matching and Market Design: Bob Wilson and Mary Kline

Matching is important, and I returned from a trip to China just in time to attend the wedding of the Dean of Design, my advisor Bob Wilson, and Mary Kline.

Mazel tov, Bob and Mary!

Marriage markets in China

Brook Larmer writes in the NY Times about the changing marriage market: The Price of Marriage in China (I like the URL better than the headline: it refers to business/in-a-changing-china-new-matchmaking-markets.) Her story (well worth reading in its entirety) follows two marriage markets, one an expensive matchmaking service for wealthy men, one an open air market in a park where mothers seek spouses for their children.

"Ms. Yang, 28, is one of China’s premier love hunters, a new breed of matchmaker that has proliferated in the country’s economic boom. The company she works for, Diamond Love and Marriage, caters to China’s nouveaux riches: men, and occasionally women, willing to pay tens and even hundreds of thousands of dollars to outsource the search for their ideal spouse.
...
"When the woman walked into H & M, Ms. Yang intercepted her in the sweater aisle. “I’m so sorry to bother you,” she said with a honeyed smile. “I’m a love hunter. Are you looking for love?”

Three miles away, in a Beijing park near the Temple of Heaven, a woman named Yu Jia jostled for space under a grove of elms. A widowed 67-year-old pensioner, she was clearing a spot on the ground for a sign she had scrawled for her son. “Seeking Marriage,” read the wrinkled sheet of paper, which Ms. Yu held in place with a few fragments of brick and stone. “Male. Single. Born 1972. Height 172 cm. High school education. Job in Beijing.”

Ms. Yu is another kind of love hunter: a parent seeking a spouse for an adult child in the so-called marriage markets that have popped up in parks across the city. Long rows of graying men and women sat in front of signs listing their children’s qualifications. Hundreds of others trudged by, stopping occasionally to make an inquiry.

Ms. Yu’s crude sign had no flourishes: no photograph, no blood type, no zodiac sign, no line about income or assets. Unlike the millionaire’s wish list, the sign didn’t even specify what sort of wife her son wanted. “We don’t have much choice,” she explained. “At this point, we can’t rule anybody out.”

In the four years she has been seeking a wife for her son, Zhao Yong, there have been only a handful of prospects. Even so, when a woman in a green plastic visor paused to scan her sign that day, Ms. Yu put on a bright smile and told of her son’s fine character and good looks. The woman asked: “Does he own an apartment in Beijing?” Ms. Yu’s smile wilted, and the woman moved on.
...
"As many as 300 million rural Chinese have moved to cities in the last three decades. Uprooted and without nearby relatives to help arrange meetings with potential partners, these migrants are often lost in the swell of the big city.

"Demographic changes, too, are creating complications. Not only are many more Chinese women postponing marriage to pursue careers, but China’s gender gap — 118 boys are born for every 100 girls — has become one of the world’s widest, fueled in large part by the government’s restrictive one-child policy. By the end of this decade, Chinese researchers estimate, the country will have a surplus of 24 million unmarried men.

"Without traditional family or social networks, many men and women have taken their searches online, where thousands of dating and marriage Web sites have sprung up in an industry that analysts predict will soon surpass $300 million annually. These sites cater mainly to China’s millions of white-collar workers. But intense competition, along with mistrust of potential mates’ online claims, has spurred a growing number of singles — rich and poor — to turn to more hands-on matchmaking services.
...
"Dozens of high-end matchmaking services have sprung up in China in the last five years, charging big fees to find and to vet prospective spouses for wealthy clients. Their methods can turn into gaudy spectacle. One firm transported 200 would-be trophy wives to a resort town in southwestern China for the perusal of one powerful magnate. Another organized a caravan of BMWs for rich businessmen to find young wives in Sichuan Province. Diamond Love, among the largest love-hunting services, sponsored a matchmaking event in 2009 where 21 men each paid a $15,000 entrance fee.
...
"The company’s wealthiest, highest-paying clients — 90 percent of whom are men — show little interest in lectures or databases. They want exclusive access to what Ms. Fei coolly refers to as “fresh resources”: young women who haven’t yet been exposed to other suitors online. It’s the love hunters’ job to find them.

"Besides giving clients a vastly expanded pool of marriage prospects, these campaigns offer a sense of security. Rigorous background checks screen out what Ms. Fei calls “gold diggers, liars and people of loose morals.” Depending on a campaign’s size, Diamond Love charges from $50,000 to more than $1 million. Ms. Fei makes no apologies for the high fees.

“Why shouldn’t they pay more to find the perfect wife?” she asked me. “This is the most important investment in their lives.”
...
"One afternoon when we met, the normally animated Ms. Yang slumped onto the sofa, exhausted. She had just spent an hour with a rich Chinese businesswoman in her late 30s. The woman proposed spending $100,000 on a campaign to find a husband who matched her status.

“I had to tell her we couldn’t take her case,” Ms. Yang said. “No wealthy Chinese man would ever marry her. They always want somebody younger, with less power.”

"We sat in silence a minute before Ms. Yang spoke again. “It’s depressing to think about these ‘leftover women,’ ” she said. “Do you have them in America, too?”
...
"The marriage candidates on offer in the parks, she discovered, were often a mismatch of shengnu (“leftover women”) and shengnan (“leftover men”), two groups from opposite ends of the social scale. Shengnan, like her son, are mostly poor rural men left behind as female counterparts marry up in age and social status. The phenomenon is exacerbated by China’s warped demographics, as the bubble of excess men starts to reach marrying age.

Finding a Chinese spouse can be even more challenging for so-called leftover women, even if they often have precisely what the shengnan lack: money, education and social and professional standing. One day in the Temple of Heaven park, I met a 70-year-old pensioner from Anhui Province who was seeking a husband for his eldest daughter, a 36-year-old economics professor in Beijing.

“My daughter is an outstanding girl,” he said, pulling from his satchel an academic book she had published. “She’s been introduced to about 15 men over the past two years, but they all rejected her because her degree is too high.”
...
"Even in the countryside, where men’s families pay bride prices, inflation is rampant. Ms. Yu’s family paid about $3,500 when Mr. Zhao’s older brother married 10 years ago in rural Heilongjiang. Today, she said, brides’ families ask for $30,000, even $50,000. An apartment, the urban equivalent of the bride price, is even further out of reach. At Mr. Zhao’s current income, it would take a decade or two before he could  afford a small Beijing apartment, which he said would start at about $100,000. “I’ll be an old man by then,” he said with a rueful smile.
...
"Not long after our conversation in McDonald’s, Mr. Zhao met the woman at a coffee shop. It was, he told me later, even more awkward than most first dates. A rural migrant and door-to-door salesman, he struggled to find a shared topic of interest with the woman, a 35-year-old entrepreneur and Beijing native who had arrived driving a BMW sedan.

The lack of chemistry didn’t seem to bother the woman, who told him about her profitable photo business and the three Beijing apartments she owned. Mr. Zhao didn’t find her unattractive, but how was he supposed to respond? Then, even before broaching the possibility of a second date, he said, the woman made a proposition: if they married, he wouldn’t have to work again.
...
"in the end, he couldn’t imagine being subordinate to a woman. “If I accepted that situation,” he asked me, “what kind of man would I be?”
...
"The news frustrated Ms. Yu. “Kids these days are way too picky,” she said.

Marriage markets and credit markets

 With attitudes about money being an important ingredient of marital compatibility, is it any wonder that a readily available index for one is (apparently) increasingly being used to judge the other? The NY Times is on the story: Even Cupid wants to know your credit score


"The credit score, once a little-known metric derived from a complex formula that incorporates outstanding debt and payment histories, has become an increasingly important number used to bestow credit, determine housing and even distinguish between job candidates.

"It’s so widely used that it has also become a bigger factor in dating decisions, sometimes eclipsing more traditional priorities like a good job, shared interests and physical chemistry. That’s according to interviews with more than 50 daters across the country, all under the age of 40.

“Credit scores are like the dating equivalent of a sexually transmitted disease test,” said Manisha Thakor, the founder and chief executive of MoneyZen Wealth Management, a financial advisory firm. “It’s a shorthand way to get a sense of someone’s financial past the same way an S.T.D. test gives some information about a person’s sexual past.”
...
"A handful of small, online dating Web sites have sprung up to cater specifically to singles looking for a partner with a tiptop credit score. “Good Credit Is Sexy,” says one site,Creditscoredating.com, which allows members to view the credit scores of potential dates who agree to provide the numbers.

"On another site, Datemycreditscore.com, a member posted on the Web site’s home page that others should to “stop kidding” themselves and realize that credit scores do matter."

Stephanie Hurder on Occupation Choice, Spouse Choice, and Family Labor Supply

What is the most important problem facing young people in modern economies? Maybe it is navigating the joint processes of choosing a career and choosing and being chosen by a spouse. This is the topic that Stephanie Hurder has chosen for her job market paper: An Integrated Model of Occupation Choice, Spouse Choice, and Family Labor Supply

(If that sounds like an ambitious title, it actually doesn't do full justice to the scope of Stephanie's work, which extends to fertility decisions...)

"Abstract:  I present an integrated model of occupation choice, spouse choice, family labor supply, and fertility that unifies an extensive empirical literature on career and family and provides predictions on the relationship among career, family, and marriage market outcomes. Two key assumptions of the model are that occupations differ both in wages and in an amenity termed flexibility, and that children require parental time that has no market substitute. Occupations with high costs of flexibility, modeled as a nonlinearity in wages, have a lower fraction of women, less positive assortative mating on earnings, and lower fertility among dual-career couples. Costly flexibility may induce high-earning couples to share home production, which rewards agents who are simultaneously high-earning and productive in child care. Empirical evidence is consistent with two main theoretical predictions: dual-career couples in more flexible occupations are more likely to have children, and professional women who achieve “career and family” in inflexible occupations are more likely to have lower-earning husbands or husbands less educated than themselves."
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Stephanie’s work allows us to consider how changes in technology that make child-rearing more efficient (e.g. bottle feeding and disposable diapers) also change the labor supply of both men and women, and lead to demand for more family friendly work schedules. It also allows us to consider how these kinds of changes in women’s career aspirations and opportunities may change the demand for husbands who can efficiently produce at home as well as at work, as it changes the marriage market for women with demanding careers.

Stephanie is on the market, so you could hire her this year.

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Bartering girls in Pakistan

Pakistan court probes bartering of girls: Supreme court takes notice of barter of 13 young girls under tribal custom in Balochistan province.

"Pakistan's supreme court has ordered authorities to investigate the alleged barter of 13 children - all girls - to settle a blood feud in a remote area of the southwestern Balochistan province.
...
"Saeed Faisal, the deputy commissioner for the district, told the court that a tribal council had ordered the barter in early September.

"Faisal said that he did not know the girls' ages, but local media reported that they were aged between four and 13.
...
"Wani, the tradition of families exchanging unmarried girls to settle feuds, is banned under Pakistani law but still practiced in the country's more conservative and tribal areas."

Free-will marriages in Pakistan

Marriage is a tough matching problem under any circumstances, but women who wish to choose their own spouse in Pakistan may face special problems, although progress is being made: Defying Parents, Some Pakistani Women Risk All to Marry Whom They Choose

"Though some form of arranged marriage remains the most common way for Pakistanis to find spouses, marriage without the consent of a woman’s guardian was legalized in 2003. The change in the law has created a larger opening for many women to claim their independence, using the courts and the local news media.
...
"The tactics have given more visibility to a problem long considered largely a private matter.

“Things are changing; the girls are becoming bolder, they are continuously taking steps, and they are not afraid to die,” said Mahnaz Rahman, resident director of the Aurat Foundation, a women’s rights organization active throughout Pakistan. “They know that they will be killed, but even then they are taking these steps because they can’t conform to the values of their parents. They are the girls of this modern age.”

"When a woman disagrees with her parents’ choice of husband, she has few options, Ms. Rahman said. If she wants to marry someone else, the two must elope and leave the family home behind. By leaving the home, though, the daughter is considered to have dishonored her family, and that is where culture, custom and the legal system intersect with retribution.

"Parents frequently press kidnapping charges to regain control of a renegade daughter. Such cases can engulf entire families, as the police will often seize property and detain relatives of the accused man."

Iraqi arranged marriages--the suicide constraint

The individual rationality constraint isn't very binding when individuals don't have good outside options, but it doesn't entirely go away. In Iraq, it's taking the form of suicide by unwilling brides in arranged marriages: Where Arranged Marriages Are Customary, Suicides Grow More Common

"In this desolate and tradition-bound community in the northwest corner of Iraq, at the foot of a mountain range bordering Syria, Ms. Merza’s reaction to the ancient custom of arranged marriage is becoming more common. Officials are alarmed by what they describe as a worsening epidemic of suicides, particularly among young women tormented by being forced to marry too young, to someone they do not love.

"While reliable statistics on anything are hard to come by in Iraq, officials say there have been as many as 50 suicides this year in this city of 350,000 — at least double the rate in the United States — compared with 80 all of last year. The most common methods among women are self-immolation and gunshots.

"Among the many explanations given, like poverty and madness, one is offered most frequently: access to the Internet and to satellite television, which came after the start of the war. This has given young women glimpses of a better life, unencumbered by the traditions that have constricted women for centuries to a life of obedience and child-rearing, one devoid of romance.
...

"Ms. Merza’s father, Barkat Hussein, interviewed later in private, said he was aware that the shooting was not an accident.

“We gave her to her cousin less than 20 days ago,” he said. “She accepted him. Like anyone who gets married, she should be happy.”

"He said he would not force her to return to her husband, who lives next door. But, he said: “I hope she will go back to him. His father is my brother.”

"He, too, blamed the Turkish soap opera for his daughter’s unhappiness, and he nodded toward the room where his wife was working. “I got married to my cousin,” he said. “I wasn’t in love with her, but we are here, living together. That’s what happens here, we marry our relatives.”

The market for marriage proposals...as signals

Need some background as you drop to one knee? There's a market for that...Shock and Aww!

"She had no idea what this was all leading to until Mr. Centner, who had carefully orchestrated this flash mob, took her hand and led her into the circle of dancers.
...
"When asked why some men make a spectacle of their marriage proposal, W. Bradford Wilcox, the director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, said: “Over-the-top proposals allow men to signal to a future wife, and to family and friends, that they are all in. They are ready to man up, forgo all others and become a responsible husband.”
...
"Which helps explain why, when it comes to proposing, “they want the wow factor,” said Paula Broussard, founder of Dance Mob Nation, a production company based in Los Angeles that has made a specialty out of staging engagements, like the one for Mr. Centner, and other events. Having the aid of a middleman, so to speak, lowers the pressure of having to create a unique will-you-marry-me moment, she said. “They can still have something beautiful, romantic and fun,” she said, “and they don’t personally have to get up and dance — unless they want to.”

"A flash proposal can start at $2,000 for a simple affair, which involves all supporting players — choreographers, videographers, rehearsal rental space and D.J.’s, but Ms. Broussard said that the costs could vary widely because each event is customized. If the would-be groom wants multiple cameras, professional dancers with complex choreography and costumes, the costs can surpass $10,000."

What has G-d been doing since the Creation? (Matchmaking, of course...))

My recently graduated student Jacob Leshno left me with a wonderful parting gift: he (and his dad) arranged to have a sofer, a Hebrew scribe, write out one of my favourite passages from the Talmud, which suggests that matching is a very big deal indeed...

A Roman lady asked R. Jose b. Halafta: ‘In how many days did the Holy One, blessed be He, create His world”’  He answered: ‘In six days, as it is written, For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, etc.(Ex. XXXI, 17).  She asked further: ‘And what has He been doing since that time?’  He answered: ‘He is joining couples [proclaiming]: “A’s wife [to be] is allotted to A; A’s daughter is allotted to B; (So-and-so’s wealth is for So-and-so).”’  Said she: ‘This is a thing which I, too, am able to do.  See how many male slaves and how many female slaves I have; I can make them consort together all at the same time.’  Said he: ‘If in your eyes it is an easy task, it is in His eyes as hard a task as the dividing of the Red Sea.’ He then went away and left her.  What did she do?  She sent for a thousand male slaves and a thousand female slaves, placed them in rows, and said to them: ‘Male A shall take to wife female B; C shall take D and so on.’  She let them consort together one night.  In the morning they came to her; one had a head wounded, another had an eye taken out, another an elbow crushed, another a leg broken; one said ‘I do not want this one [as my husband],’ another said: ‘I do not want this one [as my wife].’

Midrash Rabbah (VaYikra Rabbah)

Translated into English under the editorship of Rabbi Dr. H. Freedman, and Maurice Simon,

Leviticus, Chapters I-XIX translated by Rev. J. Israelstam, Soncino Press, London, 1939

Chapter VIII (TZAV)

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And if empirical evidence is needed that some marriages are arranged in heaven, consider the wedding this evening of Dvorah Marciano and Assaf Romm in Jerusalem, and the upcoming weddings of Ilana Turko and Judd Kessler on Shelter Island, and Theresa Morin and Brian Hall on Little Cranberry Island, and a little further ahead of Coren Apicella and Eduardo Azevedo, and Katie Baldiga and Luke Coffman. (Not to mention lots of anniversaries that come to mind, including Emilie's and my recent 35th:). It appears that economists are also into matching...)
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Update (from Jacob Leshno): here is the line by line translation...

מטרוניתא שאלה את ר' יוסי בר חלפתא, אמרה לו:	A Roman lady asked R. Jose b. Halafta:
בכמה ימים ברא הקב"ה את עולמו?	‘In how many days did the Holy One, blessed be He, create His World?”
אמר לה: לששת ימים, דכתיב (שמות לא): כי ששת ימים עשה ה' את השמים וגו'.	He answered: ‘In six days, as it is written, For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, etc.’
אמרה לו: ומאותה שעה עד עכשיו מהו יושב ועושה?	She asked further: ‘And what has He been doing since that time?’
אמר לה: מזווג זווגים. אשתו של פלוני לפלוני,	He answered: ‘He is joining couples: “A’s wife [to be allotted] to A;
בתו של פלוני לפלוני, ממונו של פלוני לפלוני.	A’s daughter is allotted to B; (so-and-so’s wealth is for so-and-so).”
אמרה לו: הדא הוא?! אף אני יכולה לעשות כן. כמה עבדים יש לי וכמה שפחות יש לי ואני יכולה לזווגם בשעה אחת!	Said she:  ‘This is a thing which I, too, am able to do. See how many male slaves and how many female slaves I have; I can make them consort together all at the same time.’
אמר לה: אם קלה היא בעיניך, קשה היא לפני הקדוש ברוך הוא, כקריעת ים סוף!	Said he: ‘If in your eyes it is an easy task, it is in His eyes as hard a task as the dividing of the Red Sea.’
הניחה והלך לו.	He then went away and left her.
מה עשתה?	What did she do?
שלחה והביאה אלף עבדים ואלף שפחות והעמידה אותן שורות שורות.	She sent for a thousand male slaves and a thousand female slaves, placed them in rows
אמרה להם: פלוני ישא לפלונית, פלוני לפלונית, זווגן בלילה אחת.	, and said to them: ‘Male A shall take to wife female B; C shall take D and so on She let them consort together one night.
לצפרא אתין לגבה, דין מוחו פציעה ודין עינו שמוטה ודין אציליה פריך ודין ארכובה חבירה.	In the morning they came to her; one had a head wounded, another had an eye taken out, another an elbow crushed, another a leg broken;
דין אמר: לינא בעיא לדין, ודין אמר: לינא בעיא לדין.	one said: ‘I do not want this one,’ another said: ‘I do not want this one
מיד שלחה והביאה את ר' יוסי בר חלפתא אמרה לו: רבי! אמת היא תורתכם, נאה משובחת היא!	Immediately she sent for Rabi Jose b. Halafta, told him: Rabi! True is your wisdom and fair it is
יפה אמרת כל מה שאמרת.	Well said all that you have spoken

Adults for adultery?

The Telegraph reports: British women drive demand for extramarital dating websites: More than a million British adults have subscribed to extramarital affair dating websites, with up to 400,000 unique users logging on each week.

"MaritalAffair.co.uk, one of the largest sites of its kind, has almost 600,000 members. Analysis shows most members are parents aged 35 to 54, university educated, and browse from their own homes. Women using the site on a weekly basis outnumber the site three to one.
"Ashley Madison, a US-based website specialising in “discreet affairs” said it received a new British member every 45 seconds. More than 150,000 Britons use the site each week."

The handover of power in France

Signs of the times: Hollande Sworn In as President of France

"Mr. Hollande, the seventh president of the Fifth Republic, was accompanied by his partner, Valérie Trierweiler; they will be the first unmarried couple to represent France.

"Mr. Hollande entered the Élysée along a long red carpet in the courtyard, met by Nicolas Sarkozy, who was the first incumbent president to lose re-election since 1981. Both men, in dark suits, shook hands and disappeared inside for a meeting, in which, it is said, Mr. Sarkozy handed over France’s nuclear codes to his successor. Some suggested he also handed over the password to the Élysée Twitter account

Brides "for sale:" marriage patterns in East Asia

Soohyung Lee and Daiji Kawaguchi have a paper on marriage and matching that looks at who marries whom in East Asia.  As I understand it, they argue that there's a powerful norm there for men to "marry down," (related to having "traditional" expectations of marriage) with the result that highly educated women and poorly educated men have difficulty finding suitable local spouses, and that the lower educated men marry foreign brides from poorer countries.

Brides for Sale: Cross-Border Marriages and Female Immigration

Abstract: Every year, a large number of women migrate as brides from developing countries to developed countries in East Asia. This phenomenon virtually did not exist in the early 1990s, but foreign brides currently comprise 4 to 35 percent of newlyweds in these developed Asian countries. This paper argues that two factors account for this rapid increase in “bride importation”: the rapid growth of women's educational attainment and a cultural norm that leads to low net surplus of marriage for educated women. We provide empirical evidence supporting our theoretical model and its implications, using datasets from Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore.
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And here's a NY Times story from the point of view of Vietnamese brides married to Korean men: For Some in Vietnam, Prosperity Is a South Korean Son-in-Law

Matching and market design for Valentine's day

Valentine's day always inspires lots of stories about matching, and lately some of these are also about market design.  Here are some that caught my eye.

Ray Fisman, one of the pioneers in the experimental study of dating, writes in Slate about a market design experiment by my colleagues Soo Lee and Muriel Niederle: Will You Accept This Digital Rose? How little flower icons could solve Internet dating’s biggest problem. (see my blog post on that experiment here).

A more pessimistic view is expressed over at the Guardian: Is online dating destroying love? That article includes some discussion of Dan Ariely's efforts at designing a more interactive dating site.

The NY Times weighs in with a return to optimism (at least for educated women) in a story titled The M.R.S. and the Ph.D., which says that education is no longer the barrier to marriage that it once may have been for women.

And speaking of education, a NY Times profile of Harvard Ph.D. economists Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers points out that even if you let the tax consequences stop you from officially marrying, you can still arrange your joint lives in a way that looks very married indeed: It’s the Economy, Honey.

Happy Valentine's day to all, and happy hunting to all of you in matching mode.

Is forced marriage human trafficking or cultural variation?

A British author asks that question: Forced Marriages Dishonour Britain

"If white British women were being forced to marry men they had never met, in a country they had never visited, there would be a national outcry. We would call it trafficking.
...
"In the UK, forced marriage affects mainly women and girls from South Asia as well as smaller numbers from Sudan, Turkey, Afghanistan, Eritrea, Armenia, Somalia and the Irish traveller community.  FCO dealt with over 1,735 cases in 2010, whereas estimates from feminist organisations dealing with the issue range from 450 to 1,000 victims a year. The difficulty of collecting data is compounded by the fact that the line between an arranged marriage and a forced one is not always clear."

Matching, mate choice, and...speciation

Perspective: Matching, Mate Choice, and Speciation

Author(s): Puebla, O., Bermingham, E., Guichard, F.

Source: INTEGRATIVE AND COMPARATIVE BIOLOGY  Volume: 51   Issue: 3   Pages: 485-491     SEP 2011

Abstract: Matching was developed in the 1960s to match such entities as residents and hospitals, colleges and students, or employers and employees. This approach is based on "preference lists," whereby each participant ranks potential partners according to his/her preferences and tries to match with the highest-ranking partner available. Here, we discuss the implications of matching for the study of mate choice and speciation. Matching differs from classic approaches in several respects, most notably because under this theoretical framework, the formation of mating pairs is context-dependant (i.e., it depends on the configuration of pairings in the entire population), because the stability of mating pairs is considered explicitly, and because mate choice is mutual. The use of matching to study mate choice and speciation is not merely a theoretical curiosity; its application can generate counter-intuitive predictions and lead to conclusions that differ fundamentally from classic theories about sexual selection and speciation. For example, it predicts that when mate choice is mutual and the stability of mating pairs is critical for successful reproduction, sympatric speciation is a robust evolutionary outcome. Yet the application of matching to the study of mate choice and speciation has been largely dominated by theoretical studies. We present the hamlets, a group of brightly colored Caribbean coral reef fishes in the genus Hypoplectrus (Serranidae), as a particularly apt system to test empirically specific predictions generated by the application of matching to mate choice and speciation.

Marriage markets in transition

There was a time when the generalization that husbands tended to be older, taller, more educated and higher earning than their wives covered more of the marriage market than it does today, as the educational and earnings attainments of women are rising, along with ages of first marriage. There's some academic work on this, and also discussion in the press, of which this is an example:
They Call It the Reverse Gender Gap

"The emergence of this cohort of high-earning young women and the increasing number of female breadwinners are transforming gender relationships, upending patterns of matchmaking, marriage and motherhood, creating a new conflict between the sexes, redefining the word “breadwinner” and inspiring tracts on the leveling of men’s roles.
...
“Some of these women had learned the hard way that when they went to bars, they were better off lying about what they did — saying that they were a cosmetologist or music teacher rather than a software consultant or lawyer,” Ms. Mundy said.

"Faced with a shrinking pool of men on their level, some young women are settling and marrying “down,” but others will jump on planes for “dating excursions” to cities like New York, San Francisco and Boston where the male market is more promising.
...
"This state of affairs is not confined to the United States. The trend is global. Japanese and South Korean men are importing brides from poorer Asian countries with traditional attitudes about marriage. In Spain, Ms. Mundy said, she found high-achieving women marrying men from progressive Northern European countries like Sweden, while Spanish men seek out immigrant wives from more conventional Spanish-speaking countries."

Modern romance in China

World's largest dating event sees 20,000 Chinese search for love

The headline speaks for itself, but the article reveals some local touches.

"At least a third of the attendees were parents, either chaperoning their children, acting as go-betweens for the more bashful, or brokering deals with other parents for arranged romances.
...
"The attendees, meanwhile, had some very rigid ideas about what they were looking for. Men said they wanted a "kind-hearted" wife, not too beautiful and flighty, but modest and homely. The "minimum requirement" for the women meanwhile was straight-forward: a man with his own house, and preferably also a car.
...
"Xue Xiaoyue, meanwhile, said she was already considered an old maid in her home village at the age of 27. "In my village in Anhui, all the girls marry at 20. Any unmarried woman older than 25 leaves town because of the shame. And these days, at 27, I dread going home for the holidays because of the badgering from my parents and relatives." She had travelled 300 miles to attend the event, but still had a strict set of requirements. "I used to be more unreasonable about what I expected, and I put my previous boyfriends under a lot of pressure to do better financially. These days I still would not marry a man without a house, but a joint mortgage might be acceptable," she said."

For Love or Money

Kim Krawiec writes
"The conference volume For Love Or Money: Defining Relationships in Law and Life has finally been published, yeah!  The introduction is here.  My three posts, done just before and after the conference and discussing the event are here, here, and here.  The table of contents is [here]."

Here are the posts on my blog that come up when I search for "Krawiec".