Co-evolution of institutions and preferences: The case of the (human) mating market

Author-Highlights•Complexity constrained preferences evolve to depend on proxy characteristics unrelated to fitness.•These proxies carry information only given the institutional setup of the population.•Information processing is delegated from the genetic to the institutional setup.

This paper explores the institutions that may emerge in response to mating preferences being constrained in their complexity in that they can only be conditioned on gender not other characteristics of the carrier of the preferences. When the cognitive capacity of the species allows a sophisticated institutional setup of one gender proposing and the other accepting or rejecting to be adopted, this setup is shown to be able to structure the mating allocation process such that preferences evolve to forms that, conditional on the setup, are optimal despite the constraint on complexity. Nature can be thought of as delegating information processing to the institutional setup.In an application to humans it is shown that the mechanism of the model can help explain why men and women may exhibit opposed preferences in traits such as looks and cleverness.