The MBA Arranged Marriage Market Analysis

There are guys who fall in love and live happily ever after…
There are guys who fall in love, break up and never get married again…
There are guys who just sleep around without getting into a relationship…
And the rest of them (the vast majority), turn to their parents, who in turn, gleefully turn to the elaborate ‘arranged marriage’ mechanism…

So, if you are a guy from a premier B school in India, and you ONLY want to marry a MBA girl from a good institute and from your community, what are your realistic chances?

Now, I have appeared for a fair number of interviews, and a lot of them have asked me ridiculous ‘logical’ questions like “How many mobile phones are there in Pune’ or “How many tomatoes are sold in a day in Jaipur” or “How many agarbattis are there in Mumbai?” and similar such market sizing analytical questions, most of which I have goofed up.

But here is one analysis that may be valuable to all you single MBA guys out there:

Assumptions:
1.You want to marry a girl from the top 15 B schools in the country.
2.You want to marry someone from your community, i.e. Mallus, Gujjus, Bongs, Marathis, Punjabis, Tams, so on and so forth, who have a fair representation in a B school.
3.You are looking at women from your batch and plus-minus 2 batches. So for instance, if you from 2008 batch, you are open to someone from batches 2007, 2008, 2009 and 2010.

Now let us consider this Mr. X from 2007 batch, who is a Mallu. So what is his potential market opportunity?

•Consider an average batch size of 150 students.
•Now let’s be optimistic for Mr. X’s sake, and assume 33% are women. So average number of women in each batch is 50.
•Assume 10% of these women are Mallus. So number of Mallu women in a batch is 5.
•Extending this to 15 colleges, total number of Mallu women for a single year is 15*5=75.
•Further, extending this to ALL the women in the five years (viz. 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009 and 2010), the total pool of Mallu, MBA women is 75*5= 375.
•But before you smile and think you have plenty of options, here is the spoiler: a majority of these women are married or in various stages of commitment (in a relationship/rokaoed/engaged etc. etc.)
•So let’s now apply weighted average to this total of 375. For someone from 2006 batch, the probability of her being married/committed is 90%. Similarly, for 2007, 2008, 2009 and 2010, let’s assume the probabilities as 80%, 70%, 60% and 50% respectively.
•Now, that reduces your universe of ELIGIBLE Mallu women to: (75*0.1) + (75*0.2) + (75*0.3) + (75*0.4) + (75*0.5) = 112.
•Out of this 112, some may be settled abroad and our Mr.X is not looking to leave his beloved India. So making an allowance of 10%, the pool reduces to 100.
•But good chances are that a significant chunk of these women are sinfully ugly/boring/unmarriageable/annoying. But, again, let’s be kind to Mr.X and assume that proportion to be a lowly 25%. So that now makes the total 75.
•Also, Mr. X is in Bangalore, and he doesn’t want to disrupt his life by moving jobs/cities/houses/bars. So he wants someone who is also from Bangalore or will move there to be with him. Now, since by now, we all know that Mr.X is not exactly god’s gift to women, we assume that no successful, educated, good-looking, eligible woman will throw her life/job/family/friends for him. So we look for women who are also in Bangalore, the probability of which is not more than 10% (given the placement history of MBAs). So that reduces the pool to 8.
•However, Mr. X is also traditional, and he doesn’t want someone who is earning more than him. So assuming a 50% probability of the women earning higher than him, the number now becomes 4.
•But, 50% of them are taller than Mr. X which is also not acceptable to him. Thus, the pool reduced to 2.
•Unfortunately, one of them is a lesbian.

So our talented, educated successful Mr.X has ONLY ONE women out there for him (and that too after being very generous in our assumptions).

So if you thought, finding a girl is a cakewalk, think again!

P.S. Guys don’t freak out… remember, I suck at math and market sizing analysis!