Marriage Market

This topic was coming , surely this was coming for many reasons.

Couple of reasons was that i just finished the book - Logic of Life by Tim Hartford . In the book, the author has dedicated a chapter on this topic. Secondly one of my batch mate blogged about something similar today in his blog.

When i was speaking to my parents and couple of family friends yesterday on the topic of Marriage , the common theme was marriage is all about destiny.

Is that really true or in a more scientific manner on how Tim had taken, is it more economics driven?

My take on it , atleast in the society that we all live in , its a mixture of both.

Why do i say that?, the reasons are multifold.

At the very outset i.e. when a family wants to get their daughter or son married, economics dominate the scene. The requirements of the family for match making is such that it can only be driven by economics, given the requirements how is the supply meeting the demand.

As time goes either the supply or the demand increases or decreases but we all know here the problem is the increase or decrease does not happen proportionately on both side. Hence the economic angle of why we see people who are very eligible and who as an individual could be considered really good is unable to find a match, this is more the economic conundrum.

Now come to the other angle of this discussion. How well does destiny play a role. Pretty much destiny does have a big role to play.

Lets go a step back and see in the economics of marriage market , we say its driven by supply and demand , however say for e.g. person X is in that market and there are 9 such men and say 8 women who are there . So in the match making process , not all women would want to choose for various reasons , lets assume 4 women choose.

This would mean that out of ten men 4 actually get married and the rest six wait . Now out of ten the four were destined to get married and six weren't destined.

Of course this is way off simple to explain such a complex stuff and in our examples we have implicitly stated that all ten are equal across all factors which are necessary for getting selected. Which may not be the case in real world.

However this market dynamics do work and the possibility that getting married is a mixture of economics and destiny, cannot be ruled out.