Boserup (1970) views dowry as a payment made by women to guarantee future support for them and their children under circumstances where their own contributions to subsistence are relatively small. We call this the labor‐value model. Here, building on the polygyny threshold theory from behavioral ecology (Orians 1969), we view dowry as a reproductive tactic used by prospective brides and their kin to attract the wealthiest bridegrooms. Our model predicts dowry in stratified, nonpolygynous societies where the desirability of wealthy males is not reduced by diversion of resources to additional wives and their children. We call this the female‐competition model. We use discriminant analysis to test both these models on the 1,267 societies of the Ethnographic Atlas. While both models perform better than chance, the female‐competition model is clearly superior. It accurately predicts the occurrence of dowry in nearly 95% of societies and identifies coding errors in the Standard Cross‐Cultural Sample with extreme efficiency.
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