Affection, speed dating and heartbreaking

Love and other emotional rents play an important role for marriage decisions. A mutually happy marriage often ends a long series of emotionally disappointing matches. This paper analyses the role of “speed daters”, that is, individuals who are matched more frequently with new possible marriage partners. Speed daters change the equilibrium in a marriage matching model. Speed daters reject quite good matches, leading to a high rate of rejections and failed matches. Speed daters appear to be “heart-breakers”. This imposes a welfare loss on other individuals who meet new candidates less frequently. Hence, finding out that the next matched partner is a speed dater is actually bad news for an unmarried person. Copyright Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2015