We economists tend to search for economics behind everything. It's as if it is some kind of disease, for which there is no cure. I admit, I myself suffer from it.

Last weekend I visited Shatili, a historic highland village in Georgia located near the border with Chechnya. This unique fortress built with stone and mortar, isolated from the rest of the world makes you think about your ancestors. Our guide told us many interesting facts about people from the highlands, and one of them attracted my attention very much. Particularity the existence of “Urvadi”  -  the tradition of paying a bride price among Georgians living in the highlands. Urvadi was an amount of money, property, wealth, or livestock paid by the groom or his family to the parents of a woman upon the marriage of their daughter to the groom. I became interested in the reason why the mountainous regions of northern Georgia practiced the tradition of paying a bride price whereas the lowlands of the country were accustomed to a dowry. All traditions are motivated by some incentive; and as an economist, I believe that most of these incentives are economic in nature. Thus, a question kept lingering on my mind during my journey - what was the economic rationale behind having a dowry in the lowlands and a bride price in the highlands?

Before exploring the question let me explain how I see the two terms, dowry and bride price, in economic terms.  Bride price is the “price” paid by the groom for the bride. On the contrary, a dowry represents some kind of “negative price”. The parents of a girl are paying for their daughter to be married. We have to keep in mind that they do not mirror opposite things.  A dowry is a property given to the bride by her family, property which belongs to her and which may be controlled together with her husband. On the other hand, the bride price is some kind of economic compensation given to the bride’s family for their loss.  Brideprice and dowry can be viewed as “initial investments” for the marriage; both ensure lower divorce rates, as the costs of the divorce increases with the amount of money invested prior to the marriage (I personally think that a bride price is a sunk cost, but try to think more objectively).

As I returned back to Tbilisi, I tried to search for the economic rationales behind dowries and bride prices in the literature. The first thing to emerge in all kinds of studies is family composition - whether it is monogamous or polygamous (men have more than one wife). Bride price tends to be correlated with polygamy, and in monogamous families, a dowry is more common.  In societies where there is an abundance of resources, families have to set a negative price in order to attract grooms, whereas, in areas where resources are scarce and men are in the practice of having more than one wife, grooms are paying the price. So in economic terms, marriage payments are "prices" that clear the marriage market. Bride prices and dowries equate to the demand for and supply of brides and grooms. Therefore, when grooms are relatively scarce, brides pay dowries, and when brides are scarce, grooms offer a bride price.

At first glance, the family composition can not explain the difference in high and low land traditions in Georgia as no polygamy was practiced among the people, but if we look deeper into this issue and view women as a resource and introduce a notion of scarcity, we can partly explain different marriage payment traditions. Mountainous regions in  Georgia were characterized by a very low population density, therefore the pool of girls from where one could choose a wife was small. In addition, marriages between relatives and people with the same Icon (Xati) protection were not permitted.

If we add Gary S. Becker’s theory to the above-mentioned statement, the reasons for the difference between highland and lowland traditions become even clearer. In his work “A treatise on the family” (1993) links marriage payments to the economic value of women. Becker developed the marriage market framework to analyze transfers at the time of marriage. In Becker’s model, men and women both possess varying qualities (or potential incomes). Marriage is viewed as a joint venture that offers greater efficiency in production (household, market, or both).  The difference in payment direction emerges with the heterogeneity of grooms (different socioeconomic status) and the economic power of women. In a homogeneous society (with less variation in socioeconomic status) where women have direct input into production and where their family depends on their work,  they have a relatively high economic value and grooms are paying the bride’s parents for the right to her labor and reproductive capabilities. Becker’s theory is supported by Boserup's (1970) study on marriage payments. She shows that bride price paying societies have associated a strong female role in agriculture and is common in societies in which agriculture relies on light tools (such as the hoe) and thus where women are actively engaged. On the other hand, a dowry is more common in heavy plow agriculture where the role of a woman is limited.  The result of the above-mentioned theory in which a dowry is represented in societies with more social stratification, and bride prices are practiced in homogeneous societies, is that a dowry corresponds to the development of the more complex social order, exhibiting substantial socioeconomic differentiation and class stratification. Vivid examples are dowry traditions in India, where the caste system represents perhaps an extreme example of social stratification and sub-Saharan Africa where you find homogeneous tribal societies, which pay bride prices.

Perhaps the different economic values of women can explain the disparity in the Georgian traditions. Compared to the lowlands,  the technologically less developed highlands were heavily dependent on women's labor in agriculture. In addition to agricultural work, the economic value of women was increased by the lack of trade in the highlands. In particular, because Georgian mountain regions were remote areas, where the roads were closed off during the winter seasons because of the snow; therefore any links to other parts of the world were cut off for a good part of the year. In such circumstances of absence of trade, women had to produce many homemade goods, which in turn made them more powerful in economic terms compared to women in the lowlands. The lowlands were generally characterized by a more developed production process ensuring wealth differences between men, making them heterogeneous, while the economic role of the women was not changing, leaving them homogeneous. In such a society where brides are homogeneous and grooms are not, brides compete for more desirable grooms, and dowries replace bride prices.

Marriage payment traditions are vanishing in Georgia and are becoming belongings of our history. Marriage payments are typically associated with marriages arranged by parents. As the modern youth is becoming more independent and have more control over the selection of partners, marriage payments are becoming insignificant. Dowry traditions have declined dramatically in Georgia.  As the return to investing in human capital increases, parents invest in their daughter’s education much more and dowries are becoming an inferior way of providing brides with future wealth relative to investing in their human capital.  Bride prices have been eliminated completely as a consequence of industrialization and urbanization processes. I tried to give simple explanations of the difference in traditions of marriage payments in Georgia. This is an interesting topic to explore. Currently, marriage payments are pervasive in many areas of the developing world and have substantial effects on the welfare of women and society’s distribution of wealth. Unfortunately, there are very few empirical studies done on the topic in general and it is difficult to generalize.

The case of Georgian marriage payments is an example of how the vanishing of economic rationale behind traditions caused weakening and the disappearance of tradition itself. It is interesting to think about whether this is going to happen to all traditions when incentives change? Or are some traditions strong enough, willing people to follow them without any rationality?