Reference no: EM132313930

The purpose of this post is to evaluate your ability to apply the law of demand to a real-life situation. As I told you at the beginning of this course, economics is about explaining human behaviour. One of this behaviour is the behaviour of women and men in romantic relationships. Since the number of potential romantic partners is limited, and since people have more than one way of finding them, this is a classic example of an economic problem, and we should be able to use our economic literacy to talk about it.

The primary measure we can use to study the economic issues related to romantic relationships is the one used by most social scientists: the human sex ratio. The human sex ratio is the ratio of males to females in a population. For instance, the sex ratio for person ages 15-64 for the entire world population is 1.02 (or 102 males to 100 females). You can see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_sex_ratio.

Nevertheless, when one is looking for a romantic partner, the country population is not a good measure. A better one would be a measure of the sex ratio in that geographical area or population group where one is looking for a romantic partner. In other words, we need the sex ratio of a market for romantic partners.

For instance, if you are between the ages of 18-23, your market for romantic partners takes place on your college campus. Since 1991, the proportion of young women enrolled in the U.S college has exceeded the enrollment rate for young men, and the gap has widened over time. Between 1970 and 2005, the gender composition has shifted to the extent that women now make up the majority -54 percent-of the 10.8 million young adults enrolled in college. Given this, an interesting economic question would be whether the change in the sex ratio in college campuses has increased or decreased the cost women pay in the market for romantic relationships. And what do we mean by "costs"? Well, one of these could be the leverage women have in relationships. For instance, has the change in the sex ratio made it easier for women to be in control of the sexual encounters they have? What effect has it had on women's attitudes towards marriage or relationships in general? Has it affected how much control women have over their reproduction decisions?

I want you to find the human sex ratio in a specific geographic from this link https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_sex_ratio, for example, your home country, Canda, etc. and using what we learned in the class about the value and the law of demand explain what do you think about the cost of romantic partnerships? Whether the cost is more for women or men in that specific area? And why is that so?