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We propose a two-sided method to simultaneously estimate men’s and women’s preferences for relative age, education and religious characteristics of potential mates using cross-sectional data on married couples and single individuals, in conjunction with a behavioral model developed in game theory (Roth and Sotomayor 1990) and discrete choice estimation methods developed for simpler, one-sided choice situations (Train 2004). We use fixed effects to control for characteristics that are observed by the opposite sex but are missing from our data. Estimated mean preference coefficients determine the average degree to which measured characteristics of individuals affect others ’ evaluations of them as marital partners, while the model also accounts for variation of preferences around the means and for limitations in men’s and women’s information about members of the opposite sex. By assuming each individual chooses freely from the set of potential partners he or she finds available, we estimate preferences without having to observe these sets or to specify any details of the matching process. This makes our method robust to unknown features of the process. Application of the method to data from the first wave of the National Survey of Families and Households
Logan et al. (Sun,) studied this question.