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We employ a stochastic dynamic programming approach to study decision making by an individual wishing to have an arranged marriage. First, we show that this individual never opts out of a voluntarily agreed upon marriage. Second, we demonstrate that our marrying individual uses a reservation utility to determine which marriage proposal to accept. Third, we compute the expected length of time during which our marrying individual stays single. Finally, we focus on an arranged marriage market in which there are many identical marrying individuals and profit maximizing matchmaking firms. We show that profit maximization implies that all matchmaking firms offer marriage proposals whose utility equals the reservation utility of our marrying individuals.

In “love marriages”, men and women who wish to get married search for a bride/groom and this activity is generally conducted by the two individuals who are interested in getting married. In contrast, in “arranged marriages”, the individuals who wish to get married typically do not conduct any search activities by themselves. Instead, the process of searching for a suitable bride or groom is conducted by parents, family, and, in recent times, increasingly by matchmaking firms. As noted by Batabyal [1], it is a routine in many contemporary arranged marriages for the well-wishers of a marrying individual to bring appropriate marriage proposals to this individual for his or her approval. If a specific marriage proposal is approved then the search process concludes. If the proposal is not approved, then the search process continues. Arranged marriages have been studied by researchers in several disciplines. Examining arranged marriages within the Tamil Brahmin diaspora, Kalpagam [2] notes that the matrimonial strategies employed and accepted by all the pertinent parties still reflect deep gender asymmetries. Lu [3] analyzes the activities of matchmakers in arranged marriages in Taiwan and points out that these activities go beyond mere commercial activities and involve other types of social relations that are sustained throughout a marriage. Wolf and Gates [4] focus on Taipei, Taiwan and notice that the differential marriage rates of urban and rural women can be explained by the greater demand for female labor in the city and not by the increased freedom of women to refuse marriages arranged by their parents. Banerjee et al. [5] point out that because both sides to an arranged marriage have a strong preference for a “within caste” marriage and because these two sides are fairly homogeneous in terms of the distribution of other attributes, caste remains a persistent feature in the Indian arranged marriage market. Although the papers discussed in the previous paragraph have advanced our understanding of arranged marriages, they have shed little light on the theoretical aspects of decision making in arranged marriages. Recently, a small literature has begun to formally analyze decision making in arranged marriages. Using the so called “one-stage-look-ahead-policy”, Batabyal [6] shows that a marrying individual’s optimal decision rule depends only on the nature of the current marriage proposal, independent of whether there is recall of previous proposals. Batabyal [7] analyzes decision making in arranged marriages with an age constraint and demonstrates that it is optimal to wait a while before saying yes to a particular marriage proposal. Vaillant and Harrant [8] have used the theoretical framework in Batabyal [7] to empirically study the functioning of a French matchmaking agency. Batabyal and DeAngelo [9] study arranged marriages from the perspective of a matchmaker and provide conditions under which it is optimal for this matchmaker to either accept or reject individual matching assignments. We continue this theoretical investigation of arranged marriages begun by the researchers mentioned above. Specifically, we use a stochastic dynamic programming approach adapted from [10] to analyze aspects of decision making in arranged marriages that have been insufficiently studied in the literature. Our approach can also be thought of as a “search-theoretic approach”. First, we use our theoretical framework to show that an individual wishing to have an arranged marriage never opts out of a marriage that he has voluntarily entered into. Second, we demonstrate that our marrying individual uses the notion of a reservation utility to determine which marriage proposal to accept. Third, we compute the expected length of time during which our marrying individual stays single (unmarried). Finally, we focus on an arranged marriage market in which there are many identical marrying individuals on the demand side and profit maximizing matchmaking firms on the supply side. We show that profit maximization implies that all matchmaking firms offer marriage proposals whose utility equals the reservation utility of our marrying individuals. 1 The rest of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2 delineates the theoretical framework. Section 3 studies the use of the concept of a reservation utility by our marrying individual to determine which marriage proposal he ought to accept. Section 4 calculates the mean length of time during which our marrying individual is single. Section 5 first focuses on an arranged marriage market and then demonstrates a logical implication of profit maximization by the matchmaking firms under study. Section 6 concludes and suggests ways in which the research in this paper might be extended.

In this paper, we used a stochastic dynamic programming approach to study the properties of decision making by an individual who wishes to have an arranged marriage. First, we showed that this individual never opts out of a marriage that he has voluntarily entered into. Second, we demonstrated that our marrying individual uses a threshold rule or the notion of a reservation utility to determine which marriage proposal to accept. Third, we computed the mean length of time during which our marrying individual stays single. Finally, we focused on an arranged marriage market in which there are many identical marrying individuals and profit maximizing matchmaking firms. We showed that profit maximization implied that all the matchmaking firms offered marriage proposals whose utility equaled the reservation utility of the marrying individuals. Here are two suggestions for extending the analysis described in this paper. First, it would be useful to generalize the above analysis by studying decision making when it is possible for a marrying individual to divorce a person he was once married to. Second, it would also be instructive to examine a scenario in which a marrying individual’s decision making does not employ a threshold rule of the sort analyzed in this paper. Studies that analyze these aspects of the problem will provide further insights into the properties of decision making in a kind of marriage that is widely practiced in many parts of the world.