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Controlling forever love

Author

Listed:
  • Jorge Herrera de la Cruz
  • José-Manuel Rey

Abstract

A stable and rewarding love relationship is considered a key ingredient for happiness in Western culture. Building a successful long-term relationship can be viewed as a control engineering problem, where the control variable is the effort to be made to keep the relationship alive and well. We introduce a new mathematical model for the effort control problem of a couple in love who wants to stay together forever. The problem can be naturally formulated as a dynamic game in continuous time with nonlinearities. Adopting a dynamic programming approach, a tractable computational formulation of the problem is proposed together with an accompanying algorithm to find numerical solutions of the couple’s effort problem. The computational analysis of the model is used to explore feeling trajectories, effort control paths, happiness, and stabilization mechanisms for different types of successful couples. In particular, the simulation analysis provides insight into the pattern of change of both marital quality and effort making in intact marriages and how they are affected by certain level of heterogamy in the couple.

Suggested Citation

  • Jorge Herrera de la Cruz & José-Manuel Rey, 2021. "Controlling forever love," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 16(12), pages 1-21, December.
    • Handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0260529
    DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0260529
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    1. Hill Kulu, 2014. "Marriage Duration and Divorce: The Seven-Year Itch or a Lifelong Itch?," Demography, Springer;Population Association of America (PAA), vol. 51(3), pages 881-893, June.
    2. José-Manuel Rey, 2010. "A Mathematical Model of Sentimental Dynamics Accounting for Marital Dissolution," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 5(3), pages 1-8, March.
    3. Steffen Jørgensen & Georges Zaccour, 2007. "Developments in differential game theory and numerical methods: economic and management applications," Computational Management Science, Springer, vol. 4(2), pages 159-181, April.
    4. Dockner,Engelbert J. & Jorgensen,Steffen & Long,Ngo Van & Sorger,Gerhard, 2000. "Differential Games in Economics and Management Science," Cambridge Books, Cambridge University Press, number 9780521637329.
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