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The mathematics of sex and marriage, revisited

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  • Maia Martcheva
  • Fabio Milner

Abstract

We analyze the problem of modeling marriages in a two-sex model of population dynamics. We first deal with the problem of incomplete and inconsistent census data and then use a simulator to compare the performance of a variety of marriage functions in modeling births and couples during the ten-year period between consecutive U.S. censuses. Unlike most empirical methods for comparing marriage functions based on goodness of fit, the differences in the projections of the various functions in our method are of the same magnitude (or even smaller) than the errors between the projected and real data. We observe that for the population of the United States, the harmonic mean function frequently found and used in the literature is a quite poor performer when compared with many other functions in the family we use.

Suggested Citation

  • Maia Martcheva & Fabio Milner, 2001. "The mathematics of sex and marriage, revisited," Mathematical Population Studies, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 9(2), pages 123-141.
    • Handle: RePEc:taf:mpopst:v:9:y:2001:i:2:p:123-141
    DOI: 10.1080/08898480109525499
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    Cited by:

    1. Matthews, A.P. & Garenne, M.L., 2013. "A dynamic model of the marriage market—Part 2: Simulation of marital states and application to empirical data," Theoretical Population Biology, Elsevier, vol. 88(C), pages 86-93.
    2. Matthews, A.P. & Garenne, M.L., 2013. "A dynamic model of the marriage market—Part 1: Matching algorithm based on age preference and availability," Theoretical Population Biology, Elsevier, vol. 88(C), pages 78-85.

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