Economics and Online Dating

Happy Valentines Day, dear SLACERs! In case your are alone, looking for love this Valentines Day, SLACE has you covered.  I recently listened to a Freakonomics podcast about online dating.  The program discusses how economic principles can improve your online profile. 

Here is a description of the podcast:

The episode is, for the most part, an economist’s guide to dating online. (Yes, we know: sexy!) You’ll hear tips on building the perfect dating profile, and choosing the right site (a “thick market,” like Match.com, or “thin,” like GlutenfreeSingles.com?). You’ll learn what you should lie about, and what you shouldn’t. Also, you’ll learn just how awful a person can be and, if you’re attractive enough, still reel in the dates.

First you’ll hear Stephen Dubner interview Alli Reed, a comedy writer living in Los Angeles, who conducted an experiment of sorts on OkCupid:

REED: I wanted to see if there was a lower limit to how awful a person could be before men would stop messaging her on an online dating site.

So she created a fake profile for a woman she called “AaronCarterFan” (Aaron Carter, for the uninitiated, is the younger brother of a Backstreet Boy.) Reed loaded her profile with despicable traits (see the whole list below) but used photos of a model friend. In the episode, you’ll hear how this works out. (For more, see Reed’s Cracked.com article “Four Things I Learned from the Worst Online Dating Profile Ever.“). . . .

Then you’ll hear from Paul Oyer, a labor economist at Stanford and author of the new book Everything I Ever Needed to Know about Economics I Learned from Online Dating. Oyer hadn’t thought much about online dating until he re-entered the dating scene himself after a long absence and was struck by the parallels between the dating markets and labor markets. If only people approached dating like an economist, he thought, they’d be better off.

One brave soul took the challenge. PJ Vogt, a producer of the public-radio show On The Media and co-host of the podcast TLDR. Vogt opened up his OkCupid profile to let Oyer dissect and, theoretically, improve it. You’ll hear what Vogt had done right, what Oyer thinks was wrong, and what happens when you update your profile, economist-style.

Finally, the economist Justin Wolfers points out one of the most revolutionary benefits of online dating — finding matches in traditionally “thin” markets:

WOLFERS: So I do think it’s a really big deal for young gay and lesbian men and women in otherwise homophobic areas. It’s also a very big deal in the Jewish community. J-Date. All my Jewish friends talk about being under pressure from mum to meet a good Jewish boy or girl, but they don’t happen to be everywhere, but they’re all over J-Date. And I imagine this is true in other ethnic communities. And certainly there are, it’s enormously easy to match on very, very specific sexual preferences.

And since online dating occasionally leads to offline marriage, we’ll look into that topic in next week’s podcast, in the first of a two-parter called “Why Marry?”