What We Expect From Online Dating

Perhaps it all began in 1727 when, in what was probably the Manchester Weekly Journal’s first personal ad, Helen Morrison said she was looking for a “nice gentleman.”

From there, we can take the leap to 1964.

At Harvard, renting time on a massive mainframe computer, three students developed a dating algorithm called Operation Match. To receive the names of five “compatible dates” all you had to do was answer 135 questions and pay $3. The rest of the story is match making history.

Internet Dating

But we might have reached a plateau.

Comparing Pew Research numbers from 2019 and then 2022, we remained at 30 percent of the adults they surveyed saying they had used a dating site or app. Then, among the eight listed in their survey. Tinder was most popular, followed by Match and Bumble. However, with the older cohort preferring Match, age did make a difference.

Below, you can see Tinder had a 46 percent share and Match, 34 percent, of online dating users:

Looking back to pre-Covid, we had a massive change in how we met our mate. Whether looking at friends, family, or co-workers, in church or in school, the trend was down. Meanwhile our online connections skyrocketed:

As you might expect, the younger you are, the more likely your date started online. Whereas 53 percent of adults under 30 have used a dating app, the number descends to 20 percent for those of us between 50 and 64 and to 13 percent for the 65 and over crowd.

Meanwhile, attitiudes and questions remain. More men report a postive online dating experience than women as do more LGB than straight users. As for the questions, safety is at the top of the list and also whether meeting online can lead to a long term relationship.

Our Bottom Line: Dating Markets

As economists, we can say that a market is not necessarily a place. Instead, it is a process through which supply and demand determine price and quantity. And, in dating markets, price need not be money. Instead, we are looking at the qualities that men and women consider on the demand and supply sides of the market.

Gary Becker

Nobel Laureate Gary Becker (1930-2014) first introduced the concept of a marriage market during the 1960s. At the time he told us that dating behavior is not necessarily about love and marriage. Instead think utility functions. People want to marry because they expect to “raise their utility level above what it would be were they to remain single.” As a result, through the supply of and demand for women and men in marriage markets, they find their mate.

Alvin Roth

More recently, Nobel Laureate Alvin Roth (born 1951) provided insight about marriage markets. Bringing a new word to the discussion, he explained that marriage and mating occur in matching markets that function better if they are sufficiently “thick.” All he meant by “thick” was more transaction volume. With online dating, we have thicker markets that increase the number of matching possibilities.

Or, as one researcher commented, “Your friends and your mom know a few dozen people. Match.com knows a million.” Through tiny dating markets, “Our friends and moms were underserving us.”

But, on the other hand, most of us don’t think that an online dating algorithm can predict love:

My sources and more: Through studies that ranged from internet dating to personal ads, Pew had a treasure trove of facts about online dating markets. Then, Alvin Roth’s interview with the Minneapolis Fed and the Roth book, Who Gets What–and Why, were ideal for grasping his matching research.

Please note that parts of today’s “Bottom Line” were in a previous econlife.