Online Dating Mechanism by Yuqing Zhang
http://home.uchicago.edu/~ghitsch/Hitsch-Research
http://www.huffingtonpost.com
Online dating is exploding in popularity, as it provides a much easier and comfortable way for people to find a partner. One can simply browsing hundreds thousands of pictures while sitting on a couch, holding a can of beer and wearing his pajamas without the awkward moment when going out with a woman in a fancy restaurant. Another reason that makes online dating so attractive is that friends don’t always find the best fit for you. ‘They just want to find someone to shut me up’ said an anonymous user of online dating website during a survey. The biggest benefit of using online dating website, is to get a filter for both psychology and physical safety. The aspect of physical safety is intuitive: essentially you are anonymous to everyone and everyone is stranger to you as well. You don’t have to talk about your job, family, income…so basically you can choose to be whoever you want to be. While in reality it can be quite challenging for a man to go out a date smoothly without showing off his status, education and job. Also one can choose who to talk to and for how long, and thus eliminating the chance of giving out your number at bar without really knowing the person.
You might also consider online dating website as a mechanism of safe rejection. Based on the experience of an online blogger Tony Joaquin-Division who shared his story of using dating website, he received 387 rejection emails. Even though it is not a fascinating result, it is still better than being rejected 387 times face to face. For whatever reason those people send out rejection letter, they still don’t know you. As Tony said, ‘who cares? You don’t know what you are missing because you really don’t know me’ and thus it provides a protection for the feelings of those being rejected. However, at the same time, this also raises a new question: do people tend to lie online? The answer to the question is, unfortunately, yes. This means that when a men browsing through thousands of pictures before finding the perfect match of a 120 lbs girl, she might, in fact, weighs 180 pounds. Many websites are trying to improve this by requesting more specific data through mandatory survey which includes ‘demographic, socioeconomic and physical information as detailed as possible (eye color, hair color …)’. In addition, users also need to provide information about their personality, life style and even questions like ‘when do you expect to go on first date? What’s your religion and political views?’ According to research conducted by Chicago University, answering questions in essays rather than simple yes or no can also reveal much more information. Just as the movie ‘Her’ described about the future of online dating, the voice information will also be available so it can do great help to visualize a person’s image and eventually direct to a more efficient match. The system will evolved to be smart enough to connect two people together based on both implicit information from their essays and explicit information form registration form.
There is a very interesting research conducted in Chicago University that brings up a unique view of online dating. They first observed the choice set with the decision made by users and then investigate the online dating data to predict the mate preference. They claimed that data from dating website provide more information than those of marriage models because dating websites contain specific data like physical traits. Finally they compared the predicted preference with Shapley’s marriage model and came to a surprising conclusion that 1)’ Shapley’s model does not provide literature about online dating but it does provide a benchmark for two-sided market efficiency.’ 2)’ Online dating market achieves an approximately efficient outcome within set of stable matching. The site user would not prefer matches under Gale-Shapley mechanism to actually achieved match online. ’