Matching, Sharing and Love

The standard empirical matching model used for the past 40 years largely ignores love. A justification for this has been that that ‘we [economists] are largely ignorant of the implications of love for matching (beyond casual and anecdotal evidence). And it is typically the type of question an economist should be reluctant to consider: data are scarce, theory of no help, and at the end of the day we are not that much interested in the answer”. I agree with the first sentence on our ignorance. If data are scarce, we should think about generating the data that is needed. If the theory that eonomists have is no, perhaps we should talk to other social scientists – they have lots of theories.