Economists in love

Apologies if I have just ruined your breakfast. The recent book Spousonomics ("using economics to master love marriage and dirty dishes) by Paula Szuchman & Jenny Anderson now has a blog. Yeah, who hasn't ? One feature of the blog is short interviews with economists on their love life. Sounds horrific doesn't it? Lets just hope there isn't a movie, seeing Larry Summers in The Social Network was bad enough.

Is love in the air?

Love is in the air everywhere I look around. Love is in the air, every sight and every sound. And I don't know if I'm being foolish, don't know if I'm being wise but it's something that I must believe in and it's there when I look in your eye. Well not really but according to a recent article in an Irish newspaper (which I have mislaid) there is a boom in the number of couples marrying, despite or perhaps because of the recession.
On the hand marriages cost money so we would expect a fall but according to Oswald & Clark, the utility of marriage is worth a lot in monetary terms (about £70k per annum, in 2001 prices) so one might expect people to substitute into marriage since cash is hard to come by these days.
So whats the evidence for Ireland? I plot about 20 years of data on annual marriage and unemployment rates (which I extracted with some difficulty from the CSO web site). While its hard to infer much it seems that largely marriage rates fall as unemployment rises though it may rise at the high rates we currently observe.

Ask Carole: an evolutionary agony aunt just for you

In some previous posts I offered some insights from psychology into affairs of the heart. Just trying to be helpful. Unbeknownst to me that fine newspaper The Guardian has a regular column by an evolutionary agony aunt using peer reviewed research to shed light on all sorts of relationship issues that I would blanche at discussing. She's the real deal.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/series/ask-carole

What women want

A perennial topic in evolutionary biology is the determinants of mating success. A commonly held view is that men want good looking women [as a signal of a good quality genotype] and women want intelligent and/or economically successful men [who will support them bringing up baby]. Since this topic is also of some practical, as well as scientific, importance it seemed worth another look. Just trying to help you guys.
Using the trusty NCDS [the 1958 British birth cohort] I model the probability of being married at age 33 for males only. After a certain amount [though not exhaustive, its only a blog] of experimentation some interesting results emerge. While this is not a definitive statement, it shows how its not too difficult to come up with results that differ from conventional wisdom.

1. Being aggressive helps
2. Being withdrawn does not
3. Being smart, hardworking or more educated makes no difference
4. The higher your BMI is up to a value of about 20 the better: thereafter it makes no difference i.e. you can be too skinny but not too fat
5. Height is not that big a deal
6. If you were judged a wild child at age 11 [by your teacher], this is not a good omen
7. Dont' be sad: if you show depressive tendencies at 23, this is also not a good omen

Some of these results are certainly contrary to intuition and received wisdom generally, especially 3. There may be other subtleties i.e. there may be limits to the attractions of male aggression.

	Men
	Married @ 33
aggressive	0.0283*
	(2.27)
withdrawn	-0.0269**
	(3.05)
hardworking	0.0115
	(1.41)
ability	-0.00717
	(0.67)
School after 16	-0.0336
	(1.51)
Bmi <20	0.0621*
	(2.55)
Bmi >20	0.000912
	(0.26)
Height @23	0.0720
	(1.81)
Bad boy @ 11	-0.00236*
	(2.16)
Malaise @ 23	-0.0129***
	(3.30)
N	2975

Marginal effects; Absolute t statistics in parentheses

(d) for discrete change of dummy variable from 0 to 1

^* p <.05>** p <.01>*** p <.001>

How not to get rejected: evidence on the Ultimatum Game & some advice from Dr Kev

The Ultimatum Game is widely used in experimental economics. One of the peculiar findings is the high rate of rejection. A good homo economicus would never reject. The paper below reports the interesting finding that people are more likely not to reject the offer in this game if they delay the decision just by a few minutes.
One might conjecture that this has implications for other offers like asking someone out on a date. If you can contrive to have the decision delayed then maybe you are in with a better chance. What have you got to lose?

Let me sleep on it: Delay reduces rejection rates in Ultimatum Games
Grimm, Veronika, & Mengel, Friederike
We show that delaying acceptance decisions in the Ultimatum Game drastically increases acceptance rates of low offers. While in standard treatments without delay less than 20% of low offers are accepted, these numbers increase to around 65-75% as we delay the acceptance decisions by around 10 minutes. Our findings provide precise evidence for familiar notions such as ''sleeping on it'' and show that there may be a good reason why public administrations often communicate bad news on Friday afternoons. They shed new light on recent evidence in Neuroscience on brain activation after receiving bad news and raise questions about the extent to which decisions reveal the preferences of a decision-maker.
http://edocs.ub.unimaas.nl/loader/file.asp?id=1491