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0 pointsrayiner13y ago0 comments

That's a very "Hollywood" way to think. If you're looking for a compatible someone, why not increase your chances by searching among a group of people who are also looking for a compatible someone, instead of hoping you randomly happen upon people while out with your friends.

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derefr13y ago· 2 in thread

For an actual, sound reason: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons

Just as with employers looking for employees, some of the people who are looking just haven't found the right fit yet. The rest are people nobody wants. The former churn (or dwindle if the market isn't being replenished), while the latter remain constant.

The game-theoretic optimum in a market for lemons--whatever you might think of it--is to avoid "dating" to begin with, and instead just find someone desirable and seduce them away from whoever they're currently with. In employment, this is called "headhunting." :)

rayinerOP13y ago

I don't think that's a particularly apt analogy, for the simple reason that people break up for all sorts of reasons that have nothing to do with one or the other person being a "lemon." Relationships are based on idiosyncratic compatibility, unlike cars where "lemon" is a well-defined, universal concept. E.g. it's rare that one person's lemon will be another person's dream car, but that's often the case for relationships.

A more apt economic analogy is that dating is a market where deals are hard to match up, transaction costs are high, and the repetition rate of testing compatibility to lead to a possible deal is low. Online dating reduces transaction costs, in the same way EBay does.

derefr13y ago

People break up with their cars for many idiosyncratic reasons as well. That just means there are good deals churning into the market; not that it's not a market for lemons. The requirement of a market for lemons is simply that it's very hard to discern the quality of a product, and that the people offering low-quality products are incentivized to hide the defects, so defective products "pile up" in the market, rather than being "flushed out" by some sort of spam-filtering process.

Also,

> a market where deals are hard to match up, transaction costs are high, and the repetition rate of testing compatibility to lead to a possible deal is low

This describes the housing market perfectly. It's also a market for lemons, or rather, it would be--homeowners are incentivized to hide defects in their homes--but we have house inspectors to remove this property from the system. There are no date inspectors.

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