Population-wide marriage patterns produced by individual mate-search heuristics (2003)
Authors
Abstract
The psychological prolem of uncovering the mechanisms by which people select mates or marriage partners and the demographic problem of understanding the emergence of population -level patterns of marriage can be brought together to illuminate each other. In this paper we combine a top-down demographic approach with a bottom-up psychological approach to study marriage and mate search via agent-based simulations. We model a group of agents searching for mates using individual aspiration-based satisficing heuristics, which are simple, psychologically plausible mechanisms suggested by the framework of bounded rationality. By comparing the resulting population-level patterns with the general features of demographically observed age-at-marriage distributions we find that the psychological mechanisms must be refined to account for the empirical data. In particular we show the importance of heterogeneity across individuals for producing realistic marriage times.
Bibliographic entry
Todd, P. M., & Billari, F. C. (2003). Population-wide marriage patterns produced by individual mate-search heuristics. In F. C. Billari & A. Prskawetz (Eds.), Agent-based computational demography: Using simulation to improve our understanding of demographic behaviour (pp. 117-137). Heidelberg: Physica-Springer.
Miscellaneous
| Publication year | 2003 | |
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| Document type: | In book | |
| Publication status: | Published | |
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