The ”Wedding-Ring”: An agent-based marriage model based on social interaction

In this paper we develop an agent-based marriage model based on social interaction. We build an population of interacting agents whose chances of marrying depend on the availability of partners, and whose willingness to marry depends on the share of relevant others in their social network who are already married. We then let the typical aggregate age pattern of marriage emerge from the bottom-up. The results of our simulation show that micro-level hypotheses founded on existing theory and evidence on social interaction can reproduce age-at-marriage patterns with both realistic shape and realistic micro-level dynamics. 1Carlo F. Dondena Center for Research on Social Dynamics, IGIER and Department of Decision Sciences, Università Bocconi,Milan. E-mail: [email protected] 2Vienna Institute of Demography, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna. E-mail: [email protected] 3Vienna Institute of Demography, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna. E-mail: [email protected] 4Vienna Institute of Demography, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna. E-mail: [email protected] http://www.demographic-research.org 59 Billari et al: The "Wedding-Ring": An agent-based marriage model based on social interaction