Married people can get along (sometimes)

Economics isn't usually very romantic (just ask my girlfriend), but in the spirit of Valentine's Day I thought I'd share an experimental economics working paper probing how married couples interact with each other. It was released in December by three French economists.

The researchers recruited 100 married couples from the Toulouse area and pulled them into their lab to play a prisoner's dilemma game with both their partner and with other people.

The prisoner's dilemma is a game where you choose to either cooperate or "defect" with a partner. If both people cooperate, you get the best possible payout from the game, but if your partner defects while you try to cooperate, you do really badly. Thus, if you don't trust your partner to cooperate, it makes sense for both people to defect, even though you'll be worse off than if you both cooperated.

The economics of orgasms

In case you thought there were any topics that are off-limits for economists, Hugo Mialon from Emory University in Atlanta has produced a working paper on orgasms (hat tip to Greg Mankiw, who posted on his blog that Mialon is presenting the paper at the upcoming American Economic Association meeting).

Mialon uses game theory to develop predictions on whether or not people will fake orgasms, and then uses survey data to show his predictions are accurate. He argues that how close people are to their sexual prime (late teens for men and about 30 for women), their chances of getting caught and whether or not they love their partner (Mialon uses a very rigid definition of love) all matter.

Football and violence

An unsettling new study suggests that upset losses in NFL games cause an increase in reports of male-on-female domestic violence (hat tip to Freakonomics).

The study is by controversial economist David Card and Gordon Dahl. They look at how many reports of domestic abuse police in NFL cities receive shortly after games where the local team was expected to win by more than three points, but actually lost. They find that these upset games increase the likelihood of domestic violence occurring by 8% for male-on-female violence compared to non-game days. There was no notable effect on female-on-male violence.