The Optimal Reservation Utility in Models of Decision Making in Arranged Marriages

The notion of a reservation quality or utility is a key feature of Batabyal’s (2003a) recent analysis of decision making in arranged marriages. In this model, the magnitude of the reservation utility has a non-trivial impact on the decision to accept or decline a marriage proposal. Even so, Batabyal (2003a) treats the marrying agent’s reservation utility as an exogenous variable. Consequently, the purpose of this paper is to endogenize the reservation utility variable in the context of a dynamic and stochastic model of decision making in arranged marriages. Our analysis leads to two results. First, we demonstrate that the optimal reservation utility is the solution to a particular maximization problem. Second, we show that theoretical circumstances exist in which the optimal reservation utility is unique