Mean-field games for marriage

PLoS One. 2014 May 7;9(5):e94933. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0094933. eCollection 2014.

Authors

Dario Bauso¹, Ben Mansour Dia², Boualem Djehiche³, Hamidou Tembine², Raul Tempone²

Affiliations

¹ Dipartimento di Ingegneria Chimica, Gestionale, Informatica, Meccanica, Palermo, Italy.
² SRI Center for Uncertainty Quantification in Computational Science and Engineering, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Thuwal, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
³ Department of Mathematics, Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Stockholm, Sweden.

Abstract

This article examines mean-field games for marriage. The results support the argument that optimizing the long-term well-being through effort and social feeling state distribution (mean-field) will help to stabilize marriage. However, if the cost of effort is very high, the couple fluctuates in a bad feeling state or the marriage breaks down. We then examine the influence of society on a couple using mean-field sentimental games. We show that, in mean-field equilibrium, the optimal effort is always higher than the one-shot optimal effort. We illustrate numerically the influence of the couple's network on their feeling states and their well-being.

Publication types

Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

Emotions / physiology
Family Relations
Female
Humans
Male
Marriage*
Models, Theoretical*

Grants and funding

This study is supported the SRI Uncertainty Quantification Center in Computational Science and Engineering, KAUST. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.