Bridewealth and brideservice as instruments of parental choice.

In the majority of human societies parents control the mating decisions of their female offspring and choose spouses for them according to their own preferences. This parental choice determines the course of sexual selection, as men who lack desirable characteristics are excluded from reproduction. Parents prefer as sons-in-law men with traits such as industry and good working ability that enable them to be good in providing resources. However, many of these traits are unobserved, while future sons-in-law have the incentive to lie about their abilities. Consequently, parents have to solve the problem of selecting the most capable son-in-law between men who have the incentive to lie. One way to do so is for parents to impose a substantial cost to any prospective son-in-law. By doing so, parents can reliably test the abilities of potential sons-in-law. It is proposed that this cost takes the form of the two most common marriage institutions, namely bridewealth and brideservice, whose primary function is to enable parents to exercise their choice effectively. The determinants of these two institutions are further explored and evidence from the anthropological literature is provided. Keywords: Bridewealth, Brideservice, Parental Choice, Marriage Transactions, Sexual Selection, Honest Signaling Introduction Until recently, researchers interested in sexual selection and human mating failed to take into consideration a characteristic which is unique in our species, namely, the control that parents exercise over the mating decisions of their offspring (e.g. Miller, 2000). In most human cultures known to anthropologists parents do not allow sexual freedom to their offspring, and they control their mating choices by arranging their marriages with individuals of their own choice (Apostolou, 2007b; Broude & Greene, 1983; Frayser, 1985; Minturn et al., 1969; Whyte, 1978). As pre-industrial societies resemble ancestral human societies (Lee & De Vore, 1968), the commonness of this