The marriage economics

A couple of months back I wrote about my reflections post 5 years of my MBA( http://dsaidso.blogspot.com/2018/04/5-saal-baad.html). Incidentally I also completed five years of married life this year. How do I describe my married life in MBA jargon?Can I draw some parallels?

I think when people get married each individual has an expectation from the marriage. In pure economics lets say he/she is looking for some utility from the marriage. Different combinations of things may give him/her the same utility. For example watching movies and helping out in kitchen may have same utility as going on a trip and not helping as much in kitchen. I think the trick lies in understanding the utility expectations and imagining an indifference curve of things that give the same utility to your spouse. If both husband and wife try to understand each others indifference curves and combine it with the budget constraint , they can try to derive the maximum utility. Now maximum utility is not always possible. Hence there is adjustment. Here we think of elasticity. How elastic are you, how willing are you accomodating to change. As I had said previously ,marriage involves to an extent giving up. How much elasticity should you have. There is no number. But you can judge as is mentioned in the book Dear Ijeawele "Because when there is true equality, resentment does not exist"

And yes ultimately , marriage is a teamwork. At its core its a teamwork of two individuals. Its a game of cooperation between two individuals with different preferances. The ideal state is to reach a Nash equilibrium where each one of the husband and wife try to make the best decision possible taking into account the other's decision assuming the other party doesn't change his decision.

P.S. the above post is a microeconomics viewpoint not taking so many examples of how external forces affect. That for sometime later.
This is my last post in the series of consecutive posts for my marriage Anniversary. Will continue writing on this topic again as well, but the consecutive posts end

#weddinganniversary #marriedlife #marriage #marriageeconomics

-Dhanashree