A neat (for lack of a better word) thing to look at is bride prices-this article briefly touches on it but it was something I discussed a lot with our exchange student from Turkmenistan last year. Prior to our conversation I had never spent much time thinking about how buying a bride would work in practice, but it turns out that it ends up being a fine (although horrible) example of capitalist endeavor.
So in Turkmenistan its expected that the grooms husband will provide a 'gift' to the parents of the bride. This 'gift' is negotiated between the parents and is for all intents and purposes a bride price. The bride's family obviously is looking for an adequate return on their investment, while the grooms family is looking to get the bride for as cheap as possible. My exchange student's parents are both well educated doctors and her older sister is a US trained economist with an excellent high paying (for Turkmenistan) job, who will in all likelihood inherit an apartment in the city core, and is in fine physical shape.
These are all fine qualities and ones that her parents have invested heavily in over the years with the assumption that her bride price will reflect the investments in her. However, the exact OPPOSITE thing happened. The men in Turkmenistan have no interest-like people the world around they want the best deal possible, so they instead go to the villages and buy a bride from there for a few goats and a handful of cash (our exchange student thought this was a shamefully small amount of money, but for the people in the villages its significant). The men don't expect their wives to work, and aren't looking for intellectual equals. Her parents have effectively improved them to such a point that they've now been priced out of the market.