Game Theory Helps to Boost Your Love
According to Traditional data apps in the united states usually contain 60% of men and 40% of women. In reality, men seem to be more active than women, which in fact leads to a huge gap in using the app categorized by gender. This gender gap eventually forces the guys to compete hard in dating apps, or they may remain single. Women report that they receive hundreds of low-quality or wearisome messages inside their user feed, and some quit because they find it harassing or unappealing.
The newly-released dating apps adapt to the evolving markets in dating apps by applying game theory. Economists identify women users’ attention as shared resources in this dating app. In this scenario, if every man tries to “overfish” woman’s attention and drives out of their patience, women would gradually quit the infrastructure. Men could have benefited more from this app if each of them act rationally by sending fewer amount of messages and reducing low-quality messages. However, in a traditional dating app model, men have no means of cooperating with each other until Coffee Meets Bagels shows up to enforce a limited match policy. It restricted the number of messages a woman user can receive and let them only receive one match per day. In addition, sending messages like “hey” or “wassup” are trivially cheap. Therefore, Coffee Meets Bagels stands out by offering its users options to send out a limited costly signal to potential matches. In that way, the app incorporates features that strategically change the rule of the “game” by shifting the competitors on the dating app from the awful equilibrium (low response rate and low-quality messages) to an optimum.
It is interesting that game theory can solve realistic problems by eliminating unwanted attention that turns women users off online dating apps. Game theory appears to be functional in similar markets other than online dating platforms: HR can receive fewer job applications with higher quality if applicants act strategically. In business, firms can act strategically to deal with the price cuts by other competitor firm, etc. Love will lead the way!
Source:
https://www.economist.com/1843/2016/11/07/how-game-theory-improves-dating-apps