Meetings and exposure before an arranged marriage: a probabilistic analysis

Abstract

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 can be told, 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, a simple stochastic model is analysed that focuses on the links between the trinity of meetings, exposure levels, and an arranged marriage. Next, the conditional density function of the exposure level random variable is derived under two assumptions about the eventual likelihood of marriage. Finally, an interesting property of a specific ratio of densities that is related to the above mentioned trinity is commented on.

Acknowledgements

Batabyal acknowledges financial support from the Gosnell endowment at RIT. The usual absolution applies.

Notes

¹ For more on these matters, see Goode (1963, p. 210) and Auboyer (1965, p. 176).

² For a more detailed account of the activities of facilitators, see Mace and Mace (1960), Blood (1967), Vatuk (1972), Otani (1991), Ahuvia and Adelman (1992) and Batabyal (1999).

³ For additional details on these matters, go to http://www.askasia.org/frclasrm/readings/r000153.htm and to http://www.youthinformation.com/infopage.asp?snID = 805

⁴ In the rest of this note, it is assumed that the marrying individual is a man. Obviously, this means that the proposals are from a variety of women or from people acting on behalf of women. The reader should note that the analysis goes through even if the marrying individual is a woman but the salience of the second question that is asked later in this section declines if the marrying individual is a woman.