Arranged or Love Marriage? That is the Question

Abstract

Even though 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. Consequently, 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

JEL Classification: J12, D81