Nash Equilibrium for Dating Apps
Link: https://qz.com/996851/why-we-need-a-dating-app-that-understands-nashs-equilibrium/
Commentary
The above article, written by Abhishek Madhavan, details the history and use of Nash equilibriums before describing how its concept would be useful if implemented into dating apps. With the recent proliferation of dating apps like Tinder and Bumble, there’s a disproportionate amount of women to men (40% women and 60% men), in addition to the fact that men tend to be twice as active on these applications, viciously “swiping right” on multiple women. This data illustrates how the ratio is skewed, creating power imbalances, something the author thought was analogous to small market changes and how they can greatly affect decision-making in Nash equilibriums. The author then goes on to describe a new app called “Aisle” that uses monetary incentive to allow people to carefully choose those they want to meet online – if they accept, you lose the money, and if they reject, you get the money back. It’s interesting to see how economic concepts and predictive models can actually be applied to things as subjective and emotional as relationships. Would using these concepts actually selectively and strategically pair people better than they would themselves?
Connection
In regards to what we’ve learned in class, we’ve talked extensively about Nash equilibriums and how they can be applied to things like auctions in terms of valuations. This relates to the article directly because when assessing the app “Aisle”, there are monetary valuations that can be thought about as the matrices that we’ve discussed in class. Depending on who connects with who, there would be a risk in losing money, which would make users evaluate whether or not it’s worth their money to be proactive.