UCLA

In demographic studies, the latent preferences for partners during a partnership formation process has long been a crucial problem. However, in practical setting, individuals are usu- ally only aware of a certain subset of potential partners, and these should be separated from preferences when modelling this matching process. In this thesis, we address this issue by constructing an awareness model for matching where individuals are aware of a subset of po- tential partners, and have nontransferable utilities for them based on certain characteristics. We extend Goyal et al.’s framework (2022) to estimate preference and awareness parame- ters, where awareness parameters are estimated based on continuous covariates. We conduct simulation studies in multiple theoretical scenarios to show that under various settings, the model accurately recovers preference and awareness parameters. We also conduct a case study based on recent marriages observed in the 2019 American Community Survey (ACS) data.