Partnership formation with age-dependent preferences

peer-reviewedWe analyze a model of partnership formation in which players’ preferences are based on the age of a prospective partner. There are two classes of individuals, called for convenience here male and female. Males and females are fertile for the same length of time, normalized to one unit. A male enters the mating pool at age 0 and meets prospective partners according to a Poisson process. At equilibrium, he accepts a female if the utility from mating exceeds the expected utility from future search, which depends on the acceptance strategies of all males and females and the corresponding steady-state distribution of age in the pool of unmated individuals. Females face an analogous problem. Mating pairs are only formed by mutual consent and individuals leave the pool of unmated individuals on finding a mating partner or reaching the age of 1. A policy iteration algorithm is used to determine the equilibrium acceptance strategies and the corresponding steady-state distribution of the age of individuals in the mating pool. Two examples are presented