Does She Like Me?: A Model of Friend (Mate) Choice Based on Belief-Dependent Motivations

Abstract

Friends (mates) are major providers of relational goods and are vital valuable for subject well-being. Since the choice of friends is two-sided, its decision making mode is different from consumption goods. We combine the idea from psychological games based on belief-dependent motivations and two-sides matching model in marriage markets to develop a model to describe the behavior of friend choice. The action to build friendship depends not only on mate preferences and attributes matching, but also on individual’s self-confidence level and psychological states motivated by the belief about whether the other side likes their own. When one is convinced that the other side does not like her (him), the agent will never go into action; When one is uncertain about how much the other side likes her (him), the agent will act following the threshold-crossing rule, while material utilities and psychological utilities both make up the threshold-crossing conditions. Under high probability belief, high self-confident ones tend to be more courageous, while under low probability belief the same type ones tend to be more conservative.