Happy Valentine's Day and Operations Research

This morning, in my email, I had a message from the Harvard Gazette (I was a Radcliffe Institute Science Fellow in 2005-2006 so I am officially a Harvard alumna and enjoy lots of mailings, etc.,  from Harvard University). In the email there was a link to an article, which reminded me that Valentine's Day is only two days away. This weekend, including Sunday, the weather forecast is for dangerously low temperatures in Massachusetts and the east coast but at least Valentine's Day should warm us up.

The article was on a recent panel on negotiation and love and offered the following sage (this being Harvard, of course) advice:

What are the secrets for long-lasting love? Lean closer to find out:
— Keep curiosity alive.
— Never assume anything about each other.
— And, last but not least, open a joint bank account.


One of our doctoral students in Management Science at the Isenberg School pointed out the following article to me by two Emory University professors: ‘A Diamond is Forever’ and Other Fairy Tales: The Relationship between Wedding Expenses and Marriage Duration. The authors evaluated the association between wedding spending and marriage duration using data from a survey of over 3,000 ever-married persons in the United States. Controlling for a number of demographic and relationship characteristics, they found evidence that marriage duration is inversely associated with spending on the engagement ring and wedding ceremony. So for all those in the process of planning a wedding, you may wish to heed this advice. This study generated, as one would expect, a lot of publicity.

When it comes to Operations Research and Valentine's Day, I point you to a post that I wrote on roses and logistics in which I also included a link to PunkOR blogger Dr. Laura Mclay's roundup post on operations research models for finding love.

Earlier, I had written a post on Optimizing the Marriage Market based on a paper with the same title published in the European Journal of Operational Research   Researchers in Switzerland and England developed a mathematical model whose solution yields a new social optimum as to who should be married to whom based on a longitudinal dataset in Switzerland. The authors used the linear assignment model.

And for all the students working on their PhDs, I also wrote a post for Valentine's Day on loving your thesis and academic genealogy.

Happy Valentine's Day!

Happy Valentine's Day, Operations Research, and Optimizing the Marriage Market

In an article in the European Journal of Operational Research (EJOR), entitled, "Optimizing the Marriage Market: An Application of the Linear Assignment Model," researchers based in Switzerland and England have developed a mathematical model whose solution yields a new social optimum as to who should be married to whom based on a longitudinal dataset in Switzerland.

I thought that this article (and associated research) was provocative and fitting given that we are celebrating Valentine's Day on February 14. The article appears in the April 2010 issue of EJOR, volume 202, pages 547-553. I read the article and thought that it was very interesting how the authors identified the appropriate weights to assign and how they assumed a central agency that would reassign the couples so as to achieve a better optimum. Interesting that, according to their study, they found that the existing marriage pairings using the dataset in Switzerland was very fair from optimal. The objective functions that the authors considered corresponded to age, education, ethnicity, and prior divorce history.

The media coverage surrounding the publication of this article has also been fascinating. See here for an article from the British Daily Mail.

I teach the assignment model and algorithm when I teach Management Science since these are classic operations research type problems. It is interesting to see extensions of the basic model developed and fitted to sociological longitudinal data.

Their formalism, I suspect, can update the methodological tools used by such companies and sites as match.com and eharmony.com

It's never dull to be keeping up with the scientific literature and, actually, it can be a lot of fun, as well, in addition to thought-provoking. There are not many existing societies in which such a top-down, central allocation, system-optimizing mechanism would be favorably accepted by the citizens, however!