On Decision Making in Arranged Marriages with a Stochastic Reservation Quality Level

Recently, Batabyal (1999) has shown that when the decision to get married in an arranged marriage is analyzed in an intertemporal and stochastic setting, it is possible that a marrying agent will never get married. This result arises because the marrying agent in Batabyal (1999) maximizes the probability of accepting the best possible marriage proposal. What happens when a marrying agent uses the following decision rule: Get married as long as the quality of a marriage proposal exceeds a stochastic reservation quality level? In this note, we provide an interesting answer to this question. First, we show that the probability of getting married with this decision rule is always positive. Even so, we point out that on average, an agent who uses this decision rule will end up single