Another way to think about how you Swipe on a dating app
The 2 articles bring in an interesting game theory perspective to the dating app world, in the context of heterosexual relationships. Male and female swiping behaviour on these apps subconsciously forms a normal-form game with Nash equilibriums. From an evolutionary perspective, males stand to gain more by maximising their potential partners and having as many offsprings as possible, while females gain more by being more selective and finding the partner with the most available resources (Note: Doesn’t capture goals on an individual level). With these different goals in mind, we can generate a payoff matrix first for dating apps that offer free versions.
In a free version of a dating app, every swipe comes at an opportunity cost since there are limited swipes a day. Hence each player’s actions are best responses to what they assume how the other player will act. From the female perspective, she will likely swipe only if she is interested in getting to know the man. From the male perspective, however, if a man assumes the woman is too attractive to swipe on him, he would rather save the swipe for someone else even if he finds her attractive, since doing so maximises the potential dates he can gain. On the flip side, if he assumes she will swipe on him, he will swipe as well to form a match. There are thus 2 strict Nash equilibriums generated, as indicated above.
What the 2 articles do not mention is how the game will change if the users are premium users. In a premium version, there are often unlimited swipes.
The payoff matrix differs slightly in this premium version, as the previous opportunity cost of forgoing a swipe disappears. From the male perspective and assuming that the time cost is negligible, their (weak) dominant strategy is to swipe on every woman since their goal is to maximise their number of potential matches. This is shown in the payoff matrix as regardless of whether the woman chooses to swipe, the man is better off swiping. Don’t swipe is weakly dominated by Swiping for male. From the female perspective, whether she gets the free or premium version doesn’t matter as much since she likely wants to be more selective and only wants to form high-quality matches so she doesn’t waste her time and energy. Her payoff remains negative in the case of her swiping while the partner not swiping, since that is a match forgone. Looking at the game as a whole, the strict Nash equilibrium is (Swipe, Swipe), while (Don’t Swipe, Don’t Swipe) is a Nash equilibrium but not a strict Nash.
It is interesting to translate male and female swiping strategy into a normal-form game, and while this is not meant to be reflective of every person’s dating strategies, it provides insights on how we could subconsciously behave in these ways without explicitly formulating a strategy.
https://behavioralscientist.org/online-dating-like-a-game-theorist/
https://thevidaconsultancy.com/blog/players-and-playas/