The Dating Game
Game Theory in Dating
In searching for a relevant article, once I decided to look for articles on game theory applications, I came upon one that applied game theory to dating. This intrigued me, because everyone would agree that dating is a complicated game. Whether or not you’d call it a game in the casual sense of the word, it is a game in terms of game theory, with players, choices, and strategies. I looked through many articles to find one that touched on ideas that are more specific to game theory, but most articles that mention game theory don’t actually delve into real game theory, but rather use “game theory” to describe any mathematical approach. (This article uses probability and mathematics in a simple but interesting strategy for dating, but isn’t the sort of game theory we’ve covered in class, and another focuses on the players and starts going in the right direction, but ditches the game theory for a more common sense explanation.) The article I chose to talk about doesn’t go into numbers (it’s hard to put numbers on relationships), but does discuss multiple strategies and their payoffs, very much in the fashion of game theory. Because dating is an extraordinarily complicated game, it’s hard to reduce it to two players or two choices. When finding a mate, there are as many choices as you’d like to consider, each one of those choices are also players, and there are other players to contend with. This article does a good job describing the game by labeling choices, identifying different types of players so you can predict their actions, and going over possible outcomes of different strategies, all without getting too complicated to follow along.
This article obviously relates to what we’ve covered on the subject of game theory in class. It doesn’t draw up any 2×2 tables or discuss Nash equilibria, but it does break down a player’s actions into simple choices and discusses the common sense outcomes of different strategies if they’re played consistently. The simplest choice the article describes is to either propose to the current best mate, which the author calls M1, or keep looking. Without adding more complexities, the payoff of continuing to look is the possibility of finding a mate better than M1, running the risk that there is no one better and you have to settle for a lesser mate. The author classifies a mate as either an open player (OP), who will take you back later, or a closed player (CP), who you will forget forever should you decide to keep looking. With this is mind, there’s a 2×2 game at work:
| OP | CP | |
| Choose M1 | 10,10 | 10,10 |
| Keep Looking | 20,20 | 12.5,12.5 |
The author of the article touched upon this in words, saying that if you know your current mate is the best yet but is an OP, then it’s better to keep looking, and whether you come back to that mate or not, you’ll know whoever you choose is a better mate with more certainty (I gave this value 20), which holds true for the mate as well assuming they keep dating. (If you marry someone else, I don’t consider it as a loss for the mate you passed up, because you are removed from the pool of mates and will not be considered when determining the best mate.) If your mate is a CP, but you keep looking, you run the risk of settling for a lesser mate (I gave this a value of 5) if you don’t find someone better (20). (The expected value of this decision is the sum of the outcomes’ values times their probabilities, hence .5*5+.5*20=12.5. Again, these numbers are arbitrary.) If you settle right away, you have some certainty that your mate was the best choice considering your past, inferior mates, but it’s only 10 because you haven’t looked at other options and thus aren’t as certain you couldn’t have done better. The author of the article does at least touch upon the optimal strategies, saying that, as a mate, it always pays off to be an OP rather than a CP (in this simplified game, it is indeed always just as good or better than being a CP). The optimal strategy for you in my contrived game is to always keep looking, but my numbers may not reflect your situation. The Nash Equilibrium would then be for you to keep looking and for your mate to be an OP, however, you can’t always depend on a mate rationally choosing to be an OP, as relationships are often very irrational.
The article may not explicitly talk about dominant strategies or Nash equilibria, but the concepts and principles are all there. In my opinion, the author did a great job describing the game theory of dating in words, which allowed him to address the increasing complexity of the game as time goes on. I put the author’s simplest game into numbers to mirror what they described in words, but “the dating game” can last for years and usually involves many, many smaller games. It’s a highly complex and interesting example of game theory we all deal with everyday, even if we don’t think of it in terms of game theory principles. (Maybe it would be simpler if we did!)