Simple Heuristics as Equilibrium Strategies in Mutual Sequential Mate Search

Human mate choice is a boundedly rational process where individuals search for their mates without appealing to optimization techniques due to informational, computational and time constraints. A seminal work by Todd and Miller (1999) models this search process using simple heuristics, i.e. decision rules that adjust individuals' aspiration levels adaptively. To identify the best heuristic among a number of alternatives, they consider fixed measures of success. In this paper, we deal with the same identification problem by examining whether these heuristics would be favored by behavioral selection. To this aim, we extend the two-phase search model of Todd and Miller (1999) to a behavioral (strategic-form) game in which each individual in the population is a distinct player, each player's strategy space contains the same four heuristics (adjustment rules), and the payoff of each player is measured by the likelihood of his/her mating. For this game, we ask whether any strategy profile at which the whole population plays the same heuristic can be behaviorally stable with respect to the Nash equilibrium concept. Our simulations show that the unanimous use of the Take the Next Best Rule by the whole population never becomes an equilibrium in the simulation range of adolescence lengths. While the Adjust Relative Rule is found to be behaviorally stable for a wide part of the simulation range, especially for medium to high adolescence lengths, the rules Adjust Up/Down and Adjust Relative/2 are favored by behavioral selection for a small part of the simulation range and only when the adolescence is long and short, respectively. We make the final evaluation of the four heuristics with respect to a new success measure that integrates a behavioral stability metric proposed in this paper with two metrics of Todd and Miller (1999), namely the likelihood and the assortativeness of the mating generated by the heuristic in use.