Marriage through friends

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a model of the marriage market in which individuals meet potential partners either directly or through their friends. When socialization is exogenous, a higher arrival rate of direct meetings also implies more meetings through friends. When individuals decide how much to invest in socialization, meetings through friends are first increasing and then decreasing in the arrival rate of direct offers. Hence, our model can rationalize the negative correlation between the advent of online dating and the decrease of marriages through friends observed in the US over the past decades.