Purpose of having marker interfaces in Java i.e., why to have marker interfaces?

The main purpose to have marker interfaces is to create special types in those cases where the types themselves have no behavior particular to them. If there is no behavior then why to have an interface? Because the implementor of the class might only need to flag that it belongs to that particular type and everything else is handled/done by some other unit - either internal to Java (as in the case of Java supplied standard marker interfaces) or an app specific external unit.

Let's understand this by two examples - one in which we will discuss the purpose of a standard Java interface (Cloneable) and then another user-created marker interface.