2021 Reports

Mating Markets

Chiappori, Pierre-André; Salanie, Bernard

This is the second draft of a chapter for the Handbook of Family Economics (S. Lundberg and A. Voena eds). The aim of the current survey is to provide an overview of these recent advances. We mostly concentrate on bipartite, one-to-one matching, e.g. on the traditional situation of marriage between one man and one woman. Sections 1.1 to 1.3 present the core of the theory. Similar tools can be applied to analyze same-sex marriages or polygamy. A specificity of this survey is that we discuss dynamic aspects of mating markets at length. Not only does Section 1.5 discuss divorce and remarriage; it also stresses the role of limited commitment, and the importance of premarital investments in shaping the marriage relationship.