Ugo Bolletta published his article “Marriage through friends“, co-authored with Luca Merlino, in Dynamic Games and Applications, 2022, 12, 1046–1066.
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 helps in rationalizing the negative correlation between the advent of online dating and the decrease in marriages through friends observed in the USA over the past decades.”