In many societies, marriage is a decision taken at the familial level. Examples range from Renaissance Europe to contemporary rural Kenya. In fact, arranged marriage is still prevalent in many parts of the developing world. Even in western countries, where it is considered to have disappeared, parents still heavily influence the choice of the mate, especially in upper classes.
However, this family dimension has been essentially neglected by the existing matching literature on marriages. The objective of this paper is to introduce family considerations into the assignment game. We explore how shifting decision to the familial level affects the matching on the marriage market. We introduce a new concept of familial stability and find that it is weaker than individual stability. The introduction of families in the marriage market generates some coordination problems. As a consequence, the central result of the transferable utility framework does not hold anymore: a matching may be family-stable even if it does not maximize the sum of total marital surpluses. Interestingly, even when the stable matching is efficient, family decision drastically modifies the shares of the surplus. These results may have some fundamental implications for pre-marital investments. Finally, we find that stable matchings depend on the composition and structure of families.