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Looking for Love? Look Less, the market for mates faulty structure

With a plethora of dating options, face to face communication is not always the first medium for love. The online dating market has grown far beyond belief for the sake of both convenience and a wider array of options. However, the seemingly optimal system to bolster date life for many always lends an unfortunate consequence. Due to the asymmetric information structure of online dating, there is uncertainty as to how good your potential mate may be. This variance often mirrors a lemon market in which people offer less for an ostensibly good offer which hurts the good types of people in the end. Ultimately, the market fails every time. I find this argument interesting primarily because if this system ends up in market failure every time (the good contenders leave the online dating market), what drives it’s sustainability? Surely, if the actual good profile people continuously left sites like tinder or Eharmony, there would only be fake profiles and the bad contenders which would put the e-dating market out of business. I think that the lemon market has it’s applications in online dating but does not fully define the e-dating market. It’s sustainable in it’s own right because of that asymmetric structure. The element of unpredictability is appealing in the dating scene so that becomes both a pro and a con.

 

Article: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/02/love-stinks-an-economic-manifesto/253064/

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