Comparative Research On Matchmaker System Of The Qing Dynasty And Modern Marriage Intermediary System

Intermediary agent phenomenon in Marriage is interesting and significant. It has attracted much attention from sociologist and so on, while it rarely has been studied in-depth from the perspective of economics. The problems encountered in the development of Marriage Intermediary System actually can be explained in economics. My research attempts to compare the differences between two marriage intermediary systems in different social systems, making use of economic theories and methods, especially information economics. It takes information asymmetry as one point of view, analyzing Matchmaker System in feudalistic society and Marriage Intermediary Agent System in modern society as the main lines.I describe and compare marriage intermediary system in the background of different social systems in this paper, including the restrictive conditions, the key factors, and the facts and features of matchmaking. On the base of comparative institutional analysis, I study marriage intermediary system mainly from information search and matching, information screening and dissemination, and conduct restraining mechanisms in-depth. At the end of the paper, I get some research conclusions and make some ponder of improving Chinese marriage intermediary system.This is an across subject research which is economics-oriented. My research indicates that marriage intermediary system matches with the background of specific social systems, as Matchmaker System is efficient in feudalistic society while Modern Marriage Intermediary System is also efficient in our society. Despite a lot of differences between Matchmaker System and Modern Marriage Intermediary System, they are methods to resolving information asymmetry of marriage. Marriage intermediary system is principal-agency in essence, however, the information mechanism is different, resulting information asymmetry and the corresponding behavior is also different.