The marriage market

When we examine what we might call the marriage market, we find that economists have already written, as with Stigler’s (1961) economics of infor­mation, about the search for an ideal mate.

There has been some recent work on precommitment strategies, in terms of choosing, at the time of marriage, whether to accept the prevalent no-fault divorce regime or specify a more stringent, fault-based private rule, in the couple’s own case. For example, Scott (1990) argues that, if the couple plan to invest heavily in their relationship, for example by having children, they ought to be able to opt for a more difficult exit option. Likewise, Stake (1992) would require the choice of a more or less onerous set of marital obligations. Marriage involves a set of state-required default terms, which cannot be varied even at the parties’ behest, seemingly contrary to a liberal view of contract. These may exist because they are the sort of terms couples would not think of at the time of the marriage ceremony, while they are nevertheless important (Baker and Emery, 1993). They may also be seen as state provision for children, who are incapable of contracting (particularly before the fact) on their own behalf (Becker and Murphy, 1988).

In the last several years, some feminist writers (not from a law and eco­nomics tradition) have advocated a re-evaluation of marriage, with the idea that movement towards the centrality of the mother-child dyad might better provide for the societal needs of child rearing while compensating for the dependency that is inevitable when people take care of children or elderly parents (Dowd, 1994; Fineman, 1995). Brinig and Buckley (1999b) criticize such ideas because they do not account for the complementary functions that two parents perform in families.