Love is a Game: Reality Dating Shows
Loneliness and boredom during quarantine resulted in millions of viewers from around the world – including me – to pick up one of the endless amounts of dating shows. Guilty pleasures for many, classics like The Bachelor and Love Island to new releases like Paradise Hotel, Love is Blind, and Too Hot to Handle allow ordinary individuals to immerse themselves into the drama of conventionally attractive people trying to find love – or win a grand dollar prize. Many people think that these reality dating shows are mindless entertainment. However, upon further analysis, we see many of these shows utilize methods of game theory and strategies of perfect matching to maximize their chance to find love and their decision making process in the splitting of the grand prize money in the finale.
For this blog post, I will be focusing on the use of game theory in the split of the grand finale prize between the winning couple of Love Island. Every Love Island USA season finale follows a game that involves asking the winning couple if they want to split the $100,000 grand prize (50,000 in the UK.) Each member of the winning couple can either choose love or choose money. If both contestants choose love, they will split the winnings evenly. However, if one contestant chooses money and the other chooses love, the contestant that chooses money gets the $100,000 and the other is left with nothing. Finally, if both contestants choose money, they both leave with no money and no relationship. This is an example of Prisoner’s Dilemma.
| Love (C2) | Money(C2) | |
| Love (C1) | 50000, 50000 | 0, 100000 |
| Money (C1) | 100000, 0 | 0,0 |
In a Prisoner’s Dilemma, player A cannot be sure what player B will do. Similarly, the winning pair does not know what each other will choose. If the winning contestants were not 100% sure about their feelings for each other, there would be a lot of personal conflict in whether to choose love or money. In fear of getting “mugged off” by the other contestant and receiving $0, the “rational” strategy would be to choose money. However this strategy is not the best strategy because if both have the same ideas to get all of the money, they will be left with a payoff of 0. In order to choose the best strategy, contestant 1 has to consider what choice contestant 2 will make. If the contestants choose love, they will either have a payoff of $50,000 or $0. If they choose money, their payoff will either be $100,000 or $0. Based on the numbers, there is an incentive for both contestants to choose money because it yields the highest payoff if you do not consider the other player’s choice. Additionally, contestants may choose money in order to protect themselves if the other contestant chooses money when they choose love, ending up with no money and a broken heart. If both contestants have the same idea and choose their Nash equilibrium, both will end up with no money at all. The best strategy for both contestants is to collaborate, choose love, and split the money so each of them would receive at least $50,000. Even though mutual cooperation leads to a better outcome, if one contestant chooses love and the other does not, the love contestant’s outcome is worse. Therefore, this example has no pure strategy Nash Equilibrium as there is no option that clearly maximizes each contestant’s utility given the other player’s strategy.
The finale of Love Island represents a basic example of Prisoner’s Dilemma. Other shows like Paradise Hotel have a more complicated version of Prisoner’s Dilemma with more added factors and strategies. The finale tested their partners’ love with an example of game theory in which partners would take a golden ball in their hands and drop it on a line of dollar amounts ranging from $5,000 to $250,000. Wherever the contestant decides to drop the ball, they would take all of the money and leave with their partner with nothing. One of the finalists could take home the whole $250,000 prize or if both decide to trust each other, the couple would leave splitting the grand prize. The intention of the contestants coming into the show often times dictate their decisions, so let’s hope that the winning couple formed a genuine connection (or at least respect for one another) in the few weeks they spent together in the villa.
https://screenrant.com/love-island-usa-finale-explanation-couple-split-money/https://screenrant.com/paradise-hotel-finale-winner-bobby-ray-money-tatum/