Consideration sets on the marriage market

Cherchye, Demuynck, De Rock and Vermeulen (2017) combined the theory of revealed preferences (Samuelson, 1938, 1948; Afriat, 1967) applied to the collective model (Chiappori, 1988, 1992; Cherchye, De Rock and Vermeulen, 2007, 2009, 2011) with the notion of a stable marriage market (Gale and Shapley, 1962; Shapley and Shubik, 1972; Becker, 1973). By means of this novel framework, one can identify the sharing rule between spouses (who gets what in a household) under minimalistic assumptions. The approach also allows analysts to estimate economies of scale in households as demonstrated by Cherchye, De Rock, Surana and Vermeulen (2020). One very important open question at this point is what is an individual’s marriage market? In the abovementioned studies of Cherchye et al. (2017) and Cherchye et al. (2020), marriage markets were defined by means of a geographical criterion and the age difference of an individual and her or his potential spouses. This is only an approximation of one’s true marriage market since many other factors may play a role. In this PhD, we aim to combine search behavior with matching on the marriage market. Specifically, we would like to combine the notion of consideration sets (Demuynck and Seel, 2018) with matching on the marriage market.