Meetings and Exposure Before an Arranged Marriage : A Probabilistic Analysis

It is now common for parents and relatives of an individual seeking to have an arranged marriage to set up one or more meetings between this individual and prospective spouses. As a result of these meetings, prospective spouses get exposed to this marrying individual. Even though this exposure level has a significant bearing on the eventual likelihood of marriage, as best as we can tell, the economics literature has paid no attention to the probabilistic attributes of meetings and the resultant level of exposure. As such, this note has three objectives. First, we analyze a simple stochastic model that focuses on the links between the trinity of meetings, exposure levels, and an arranged marriage. Next, we derive the conditional density function of the exposure level random variable under two assumptions about the eventual likelihood of marriage. Finally, we comment on an interesting property of a specific ratio of densities that is related to the above mentioned trinity