Planning to settle down? Pester your boss for a pay hike because it is your income and wealth which your prospective better half would be looking at before tying the knot.

A team of international researchers has carried out a study and found that a man's riches, and not his looks, are the most important if he wants to get married, The Daily Telegraph, London [Images], reported on Wednesday.

Although there have been many lab-based studies that have suggested that women are drawn to men of high status, power and wealth, rather than just looks, this new study has provided hard evidence of the marriage market in action.

The researchers came to the conclusion after analysing a survey of more than 20,000 American men, based on historical data collected in 1910. When men were in short supply, for instance in the wake of World War I, women were happy to put up with poorer partners.

When men became commonplace, women were in the driving seat and became correspondingly more choosy, driving a bargain for the richest and most powerful men, with the marriage prospects of a male pauper being 'drastically reduced', the research found.

"Little research within evolutionary psychology, so far, has considered how the market influences individual decisions. Here we show that if men are abundant, this will influence the market value of their desired traits, that is, women can demand more," said lead researcher Thomas Pollet of the Newcastle University.

When men and women are in equal supply, mathematical models predict that men who are married will have a slightly higher socio-economic status than unmarried men.

With equal numbers of men and women, theory predicts that 56 per cent of low status men would be married, whereas 60 per cent of high status men would.

But if there are 11 men for every 10 women, only 24 per cent of low status men would be married, compared with 46 per cent of high status men.

Thus low status men become 2.31 times less likely to marry, whereas high status men are 1.31 times less likely. And as there are more men, the effect of wealth and power on the probability of marriage became stronger. "This means that the effects of a male-biased sex ratio fell disproportionately on low-status men, whose probability of marriage was drastically reduced," Pollet said.