Economics Meets Online Dating
According the the Wall Street Journal, Yahoo! is hiring professional economists, hoping to use their knowledge to boost effectiveness of Yahoo!, including Yahoo! Personals. How would that work, you ask: Figuring out the price of dates?
No, we are talking about more fundamental than that. I’ll take out the economic mumbo-jumbo terms out for the sake of clarity, but just a couple of the ideas might translate into services for singles that would ration the number of free messages someone could send, and disclosing how many people a single had already approached. How would that help?
Well, a certain proportion of online daters never become paying members, and use the “free” contacts very liberally. Rationing those would encourage dating site freeloaders to pay up, and would discourage mass emailers from sending out hundreds of emails to only the model-cute folks and jamming their mailboxes.
Disclosing the number of approaches to others someone has made would give information to others that might indicate seriousness of intent and what the likelihood would be that the individual was “playing the field” and communicating with several or many others.
Economic principles (as I feebly understand them) say that the more information that everyone has in a transaction makes the deal fairer and more able to work. And if something is relative scarce (in this case, the number of emails you can send for free), the more valued it is and the more carefully you will use it.
Interestingly, when I read this article, I was also just finishing “The Undercover Economist” by Tim Hartford, the first economic book I had ever read. If you are interested in economics and would like to know more about it in a readable and understandable fashion, Hartford’s book is for you.
From Your Romance Coach, Kathryn Lord
