If Dating Apps Adopted Prices
https://qz.com/996851/why-we-need-a-dating-app-that-understands-nashs-equilibrium/
Dating apps are facing a significant imbalance in their gender ratio. At first, this just seems like an annoyance, but if you consider it deeper, it changes the whole social structure within the app. This article uses the idea of the Marriage Supermarket to show how even a small difference in ratio can cause one side to become desperate.
In the Marriage Supermarket, men and women enter into a supermarket and are told they will receive $100 to split between them if they pair up. Normally they would split it $50:$50. Now imagine there are two women and three men (the article uses a different ratio). One man gets left out with no money. To attempt to get something, he now offers one of the women a $60:$40 split whereby she makes more money. So she switches to him, leaving a now-partnerless man who must lower his offer to $70:$30 to attract a woman. But that leaves someone else out. Following this logic, eventually the men all get $0 and the women get $100.
Clearly, there aren’t two women and three men on dating sites, but the imbalance in gender ratio causes men to become more desperate to attract women. This isn’t good for women either – it means their dating app feeds get filled up tons of messages or swipes. They now have to sort through more options to find the people that they might actually click with.
The dating app Aisle addresses this problem by introducing a price system to the app. With Aisle, you must buy your ‘invites’ that you send to people. This forces people to be more picky about who they are connected with. And since invites is limited, both genders will use their max invites without over sending. At least, that’s the idea. Of course, being able to buy invites means the more desperate will be paying more to send more invites, while the less desperate pay less. But at least Aisle recognizes the problems existing in their cyber-society.
While not at quite the same level, Tinder has implemented the use of a “super like” that can only be used once a day. There is a kind of price associated with the “super like” since sending it is limited. This puts men and women on more equal footing because men can’t desperately send the “super like” to five or ten people. In the Marriage Supermarket game, the “super like” would be the equivalent of everyone making their first pairing and being unable to give offers lowering their share of the money – or it would be, in a system that only used “super like”s. Tinder’s free “normal-like”s system means there will still be this disparage between the sexes.
And what about profile differences? Some profiles get over flooded with “invites” while others can never get a match at all. This is usually not thought of as something dating apps need to address, but it would be interesting to see a dating app use some sort of matching market – giving more desirable profiles a higher “price” (uses up all your “likes” for the day) in order to get more people to match up with different people.