To Swipe or Not To Swipe
The dating game in the 21st century has never been more complex. With the ability to communicate with anyone at any given moment and the ability to meet new people at the touch of a screen, technology has introduced many new elements to the process of finding a romantic partner. Tinder tries to offer a solution to these strange dynamics with its mobile app, allowing users to browse through a list of other users within a certain proximity and attempt to match with them after determining if they find these other users attractive. If two users both “swipe right” on each other, a match is made, allowing the users to message each other in hopes of them connecting. Because a user does not know if another user likes them without paying for Tinder Gold, a normal user has two strategies to choose from in the dating game that Tinder presents when trying to match with another normal user, and this is a great example of the Prisoner’s Dilemma.
Here are the two strategies:
- The Intended strategy (A): Swipe left if you dislike the user, swipe right if you like the user. If you match with another the user, contact them with honest intent to converse.
- The “Degenerate” strategy (B): Swipe right on every user. If you match with another user, decide if you like them and contact them if you do. Otherwise, ignore their messages.
Here, the degenerate strategy is advantageous in that the user does not have to spend time determining whether they find large numbers of people attractive. Because of this imbalance between strategies, there exists a Prisoner’s Dilemma.
- If both users play A, neither player knows the other’s opinion before making their respective decisions, so if they match then the match will be genuine and both will most likely contact the other.
- If both users play B, then the match will be meaningless. Both players are aware that they were playing the degenerate so the match is most likely meaningless and there will probably be no attempt to contact the other.
- If one user plays A and the other user plays B, one user will get to know that the other likes them before deciding if they like the other user. If the disadvantaged user tries to contact the other user and the advantaged user decides they do not like the other, then the user who played A is the ultimate loser.
Thus the strategies of Tinder model the Prisoner’s Dilemma, and it is always more advantageous to play strategy of B regardless of how attractive a user is. There is a slight exception- the rewards functions can vary heavily depending on the likelihood that a user finds another attractive, and thus there may also exist a mixed strategy equilibrium of these two strategies based on a user’s sense of self-attractiveness. However, the more people become tired of matching with unresponsive users (who are presumably using strategy B), the more likely they are to also begin using strategy B. This cascading effect of more and more users using strategy B ultimately defeats the purpose of Tinder because eventually no user will be swiping right on people they actually like.
In other words, you should always swipe right.
Source: https://steemit.com/life/@galotta/why-tinder-doesn-t-work-part-1-nash-equilibrium-and-prisoner-s-dilemma