And this, pretty much, explains why I am still single after all these years.
ONLINE DATING AS A JOURNEY OF SELF-DISCOVERY
My consternation about this process aside, as mate seekers we do limit our searches when faced with a large number of choices on any market. While this behavior may confound the search for a perfect mate, the beauty of it—from an economist’s perspective—is that these searches generate extraordinary data that can be used to understand an individual’s preferences for a mate.
They give economists an opportunity to observe the market for sex and love in action and help us understand how buyers and sellers on that market ultimately engage in trade (i.e., settle with a partner).
Before online dating sites started making this data available to researchers, reliable data on how relationships form was extremely difficult to obtain. You might think we could just observe existing relationships, but that information doesn’t come close to telling us what we need to know because what we observe to be a “couple” is really the outcome of a dating market that has already closed. The reason why this is a problem is that in this particular market the “equilibrium” (i.e., the couple we can observe) is as much a function of the preferences of the other players on the market (the people we don’t end up with) as it is a function of the preferences of the two people who have formed the couple.
Let me give an example of what it means to say that this market is in equilibrium. Suppose (hypothetically) that I looked at data collected from married couples only and found that women with small breasts are often married to men who are balding. If I were very naive I might jump to the conclusion that this is proof that balding men prefer small-breasted women. Of course, it doesn’t prove that at all.
It might be the case, for example, that large-breasted women have a particular preference for men with hair, leaving only balding men available to marry small-breasted women. Or perhaps women don’t care whether men have hair or not, and the reason we see this particular matching is that men who are not balding prefer large-breasted women, leaving only small-breasted women for the balding men to marry.
Either way, knowing that small-breasted women are often married to balding men tells us nothing about those individuals’ preferences for breast size or hair thickness because at the end of the market for spouses, men and women do not necessarily marry the type of person their initial preferences dictate: they marry the person who is both available and willing to be married to them.
I am not suggesting that they don’t prefer their partners to other men/ women, only that they prefer them to the subset of all the men/women who are willing to be with them. Who is available in that particular subset of willing partners is determined largely by the decisions made by everyone else on the market.
The example above may seem silly, but let me give you an example from the real world. According to the 2006 U.S. census, there are far more black men married to white women (6.6 percent) than there are white men married to black women (0.2 percent). We know that this outcome is not the result of a shortage of single black women (black women are significantly more likely to be single than women of any other race; in 2007, only 33 percent of black women were married). So what does this data tell us about the racial preference of men and women who are searching for a spouse?
Absolutely nothing.
To understand racial preferences in dating, we need to look at data collected while markets are in action, and some very clever ways have been found to do just that. For example, economists Raymond Fisman, Sheena Iyengar, Emir Kamenica, and Itamar Simonson arranged speed-dating trials in which men and women (Columbia University graduate students) met with a series of potential partners for short three- to five-minute “dates.” Following the trial, participants were given an opportunity to share their contact information (through the organizer) with those whom they would like to meet again for a real date. The point of this experiment was to untangle whose preferences were driving the racial segregation we observe in marriage data.
Based on the evidence in these trials, it appears that the racially segregated marriage market is driven almost exclusively by the same-race preferences of women; men in this trial exhibited far less same-race preference in dating. White women, on average, preferred to date white men, but the preferences of black women to date black men were even stronger.
This evidence tells us that the reason that white women are married to black men more frequently than black women are married to white men is not because white men are not attracted to black women, but because black women prefer to date men of the same race as themselves.
Another dating market study that looks at partner preferences used data generated from an online dating service that included information on member-to-member first contact e-mails (i.e., “Hi, I read your profile and it looks like we have a lot in common,” etc.) and found similar results to the Columbia speed-dating trial.
Dan Ariely, Günter Hitsch, and Ali Hortacsu find that even after controlling for all other factors that might contribute to an individual’s decision to send a first contact e-mail (age, marital status, income, education, children, etc.), every ethnic group “discriminated” based on race and the same-race preferences of women exceeded those of men.
In fact, to measure just how much ethnicity matters to white women, these particular researchers decided to measure ethnic preference against another male characteristic that women seems to care quite a bit about: a man’s income.
To do this, they essentially posed a question that can be answered using the data: If a hypothetical woman cares about her potential mate’s income and whether or not he is the same race as she is, what would a specific man’s income have to be in order to make a woman initiate contact with him even if he belongs to a different racial group?
In this experiment a hypothetical man earns $62,500 a year and is the same race as the woman. The other hypothetical man earns $X per year and is one of three races differing from the woman’s. All other observable characteristics about these two men are identical. The metric that measures how much a woman cares about race over income is how large X has to be in order to encourage the woman to contact the man who is not in her ethnic group.
The results, using the online data, are informative. For a white woman, the experiment predicts that a black man would have to earn $154,000 more than the white man in order for a white woman to prefer to contact him instead of the otherwise identical white man. A Hispanic man would need to earn $77,000 more than the white man, and an Asian man would need a remarkable $247,000 in additional annual income to make her want to contact him.
The results are even stronger for black women. In this case, the experiment predicts that a white man would have to earn $220,000 more than a black man in order for the black woman to prefer to contact him, and a Hispanic man would have to earn $184,000 more.
Alternatively, Asian women appear to have stronger preferences for white men than they do for Asian men—a white man could earn $24,000 less than an otherwise identical Asian man, and an Asian woman would still prefer to contact him.
These income differentials are large, but don’t let that fool you into thinking that all women care about is income. In fact, if that were true and income really mattered to women, these numbers would be quite small; it would take very little additional income to entice a woman to date a man of a different race. The fact that the numbers are so large suggests that a man’s race is very important relative to his income.
If you are wondering what this experiment tells us about the choices of men, it shows that men care so little about a woman’s income that it is completely meaningless as a measure of how men value different female traits. Even though men’s online behavior suggests they care less about their partner’s race than do women, the income needed to encourage men to make the trade-off between a same- and different-race partner is incalculably large. This doesn’t indicate a strong same-race preference though; it just shows that in men’s matin
g preferences a woman’s income is irrelevant. To really estimate how much men care about race, you would have to find a different measure that is important to men—like physical beauty.
AN ECONOMIC APPROACH TO THE “MEET” MARKET
This exercise I just described above is a good example of how online dating operates like a market, with individual players trading off characteristics they value in a mate in an attempt to find the best possible match given their own value on the market.
The dating market is like any other market in that it is made up of buyers and sellers, and, just like any other market, it is in equilibrium only after all the prices have adjusted so that buyers and sellers are both willing to trade. In most dating markets, there is no explicit exchange of money; that is not the price that I am talking about. Prices on this market are determined by the forgone alternative opportunities—or as economists like to call them, “opportunity costs”—that people accept when they finally meet a person with whom they choose to have a relationship.
Consider the following as an example: You are searching an online dating site and see the profile of a man/woman who is extremely physically attractive. In fact, if you ranked all people who are currently on your market, he/she would be in the top 10 percent of the distribution in terms of looks. Now, someone this attractive is going to be very “expensive” because everyone on the market will be competing for his/her attention and competition for a limited product always drives up its price. Whether or not you in particular will be successful at attracting this (incredibly hot) person will depend on your own price on the market because, in this market, everyone is both a buyer and a seller.
When the market clears, I can guarantee that the expensive people will end up with other expensive people, the midrange people end up with the other midrange people, and so on through the market until inexpensive people are left to date the other equally inexpensive people.
When men and women end up in relationships with others who are similar to themselves, economists call their behavior assortative mating. There is plenty of evidence that, on average, people end up with a partner who is very similar to themselves in terms of education, income, and even physical attributes such as height, weight, and beauty—that says that assortative mating is very common.
BEAUTY IS NOT REALLY IN THE EYES OF THE BEHOLDER
Just to give you an idea of how competitive the online market is in terms of physical beauty, let me introduce a study that was conducted using data from a website that allows users to rate others’ level of attractiveness and, if they choose, send them a message in the hopes of initiating a relationship.
Individual users on the site Hot or Not (www.hotornot.com) upload a picture of themselves along with a few lines of text, if they wish to say something. Visitors to the site can rate the level of hotness of members on a 10-point scale based on members’ pictures that appear on their screen in a random order. If the visitor comes across someone whom they would like to meet, they can log on and hit a “Meet Me” link indicating their interest in meeting the person in the photo.
Using just ten days of data, the authors of this study (Leonard Lee, George Loewenstein, Dan Ariely, James Hong, and Jim Young) were able to observe the behavior of 16,550 members—75.3 percent male and 24.7 percent female. Each member viewed an average of 144 pictures over the ten-day period, and each of the more than two million observations in the data set is an individual decision to hit the “Meet Me” link. By observing the choices made by users as to whom they would like to meet, researchers were given the opportunity to measure the preference for a mate based on physical attractiveness alone.
ARE PROVOCATIVELY DRESSED WOMEN FUELING ECONOMIC GROWTH?
In the 1920s, George Taylor, an economist at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, claimed there was an inverse relationship between the state of the economy and skirt lengths. In good economic times, women shortened their skirts to show off their silk stockings, but when times were bad, they lengthened them to hide the fact that they couldn’t afford stockings. So when the economy boomed, skirts were short, and when it lagged, skirts were longer.
There isn’t any evidence that this theory held up in the long run, but, recently, marketing researchers Kim Janssens, Mario Pandelaere, Bram Van den Bergh, Kobe Millet, Inge Lens, and Keith Roe found that single men show a much higher preference for status-type goods when they are exposed to a provocatively dressed woman during an experiment than when exposed to a conservatively dressed woman. Men in a committed relationship show none of this preference. The argument for this result is that when a single man is in the presence of an attractive young woman, his preference for products turns to those that can help him secure her as a mate. He assumes, perhaps subconsciously, that the products that will attract her are those that indicate his wealth.
These results raise an interesting question: Has the fact that women’s fashion has evolved over time in a way that makes women more conspicuously sexual changed men’s preference for products that more conspicuously demonstrate their wealth and status?
The answer to this question is probably no. One of the fundamental principles of economics is that the price of a good is related to its relative scarcity. If scantily clad women are scarce, then their price is high (where here the “price” is the amount a man must spend in order to demonstrate his affluence to a relatively attractive woman). When scantily clad women increase in abundance, however, their price is bound to fall as men no longer need to compete with each other over the relatively scarce good. In fact, as hemlines go up, conspicuous consumption of status goods might fall for precisely this reason.
Singles compete heavily for very attractive people on dating sites, and this study provides evidence of that; members with the highest “hotness” rating were far more likely to receive requests to meet than were other, less hot, users. For example, increasing a person’s attractiveness rating by just 1 point (say from a hotness level of 5 to a hotness level of 6) increased the likelihood that a person viewing that photo wanted to meet by 130 percent. Although male members appear to use a “shotgun” approach (they were 240 percent more likely than female members to click on the “Meet Me” link), you perhaps won’t be entirely surprised to learn that men in particular tried to meet women who were far more attractive than they are. Women, on the other hand, appeared to be less concerned about trying to meet men who are more attractive than they are.
On Hot or Not, talk is cheap, literally, since it only requires users to click a free link, but in other environments, pursuing a potential partner is more costly in terms of time and, sometimes, money. Because of those costs, most people prefer to spend as little time searching as possible. The quickest way to find a mate and get off the market is to accurately estimate our own value on the market—we need to price ourselves appropriately. In order to do that, it is useful to know how we stack up against others with whom we are competing on the market.
IN ONLINE DATING, EVERYONE IS ABOVE AVERAGE
People in general are very biased in terms of their own self-assessment; we are all funnier, smarter, kinder, better looking, and better in bed than the average person. For example, when online dating site users are asked to rate their own appearance, less than 1 percent report their appearance as being “below average.” That assessment wouldn’t be that surprising if many other people then reported themselves as being “average,” but only 29 percent of men and 26 percent of women reported that they look “like anyone else walking down the street.” The remaining 68 percent of men and 72 percent of women assessed their own attractiveness as being above average.
Looking at the same Hot or Not study I already mentioned, we find even more evidence of our inability to accurately assess our standing on the market. Hot people on that service are very discriminating as to whom they contact, while people with lower hotness ratings initiate contact with far more people—including others who are rated as being much hotter than themselves.
In fact, t
he less attractive a member (according to the user ratings), the more they initiated contact with other users and the more willing they were to contact women/men who were hotter than themselves, despite the limited probability that those offers to meet would be accepted.
This may seem like wishful thinking on the part of homely lonely hearts, but not only did less-attractive people seek out users who were more attractive than themselves but they simultaneously ignored users who were rated as being equally attractive. On average, people contacted members who never would have contacted them while, at the same time, not contacting members who would have been open to their invitation to meet.
The results might leave you suspecting that if someone expresses an interest in you on a dating site, then you are probably out of their league. I feel obliged to remind you that this is only true in the statistical sense; on average you are probably out of the league of most people who would contact you. It does make me think, however, that there is an online dating equivalent to Groucho Marx’s famous line: “Please accept my resignation. I don’t want to belong to any club that will accept people like me as a member!”
MONEY CAN BUY YOU LOVE
So, how much do people value physical beauty in online dating? Returning to the metric developed by Ariely, Hitsch, and Hortacsu—the one we discussed when talking about ethnicity—consider a hypothetical woman who can choose between two men: one who is very attractive and one who is not. The first man is in the top 10 percent of all men in terms of appearance (i.e., most people would rate his appearance as at least 9 out of 10) and earns $62,500 a year. The second is in the bottom 10 percent in terms of appearance (i.e., most people would rate his appearance as no more than 1 out of 10) and earns $X per year. How much would X have to be for this woman to prefer a man in the bottom 10 percent, in terms of attractiveness, to a man in the top 10 percent?
Dollars and Sex Page 7