Marital Arrangement and Spousal Cooperation

We present three lab-in-the-field studies investigating systematic heterogeneity in cooperative decision-making across spouses in arranged and love-matched marriages in Pakistan, where the former is the tradition and the latter is associated with modernization. In Study 1, we engaged married couples in a one-shot, two-person, sequential public goods game, in which we applied the strategy method to the second mover. Using hierarchical clustering to analyze the strategy data, we categorized spouses into cooperative types and found that spouses in love-matched marriages are significantly more likely to be unconditionally cooperative. Spouses in love-matched marriages are also significantly more cooperative overall. In Study 2, we replicated our findings from Study 1 in a new sample of villages similarly close to a city but found that, as distance from the city increased, the love-matched effect declined. We interpreted this as suggestive evidence that there is less tolerance and support for love matches in more remote areas. In Study 2, by also engaging the spouses in games with neighbors, we established that the observed differences in cooperation between spouses in love-matched versus arranged marriages could not be explained by the selection of unconditionally cooperative people into love-matched marriages. Finally, in Study 3, we confirmed that there is indeed a social norm prescribing arranged marriage and that this norm is stronger in more remote villages.