This paper models love-making as a signaling game. In the act of love-making, man and woman send each other possibly deceptive signals about their true state of ecstasy. Each has a prior belief about the others's state of ecstasy. These prior beliefs are associated with the other's sexual response capacity, which varies in different ways for men and woman over the life-cycle. The model predicts that love, formally defined as a mixture of altruism and possessiveness, increases the probability of faking ecstasy, but more so for woman than for men, and age has a greater effect on the probability of faking if the partners are in love than if they are not. These predictions are tested with data from the 2000 Orgasm Survey [sic!]. Besides supporting the predictions, the data also reveal a positive relationship between education and the tendency to fake.Here is the executive summary (Slate).
Econoblogs mentioning this paper: Mit dem Kopf voran (March 22), Law and Economics (March 20), Marginal Revolution (January 31 via Newmark's Door)
Great read! (but using "little omega" to denote a random variable is definitely a crime ;-D.)
Mahalanobis - am 2004-03-22 16:18 - Rubrik: game theory
