On the Likelihood of Finding the Right Partner in an Arranged Marriage

Even though arranged marriages have been around for quite some time, economists have paid little attention to the nature of decision making in such marriages. Therefore, we know very little about the efficacy of traditional methods of decision making in arranged marriages. Given this state of affairs, I have three goals in this paper. First, I formalize the traditional decision making process in arranged marriages. Second, I study the characteristics of this formalized decision making process from the standpoint of a marrying agent. Third, once again from the standpoint of a marrying agent, I compute the probability that the use of this decision making process will result in the marrying agent finding the right partner for himself/herself