The Problem With Internet Dating's Frictionless Market

Hugh Pickens writes "Peter Ludlow writes in the Atlantic that the internet has turned the dating marketplace into a frictionless market that puts together buyer and seller without transaction costs. And that's a bad thing. 'Finding a partner used to be expensive, and the market was inefficient. If you lived in a large city, there were always people looking for partners, but the problem was how to find them.' But one advantage of inefficient dating markets is that in times of scarcity we sometimes take chances on things we wouldn't otherwise try while in times of plenty, we take the path of least resistance (someone who appears compatible) and we forgo difficult and prima facie implausible pairings. Another problem with frictionless online markets (PDF) is that assume we know what we are looking for. But sometimes we simply don't know what we are looking for until we stumble across it in a search for something else, says Ludlow. 'The result is often unexpected and beautiful. So it is with relationships; compatibility is a terrible idea in selecting a partner,' concludes Ludlow. 'We often make our greatest discoveries and acquire our greatest treasures when local scarcity compels us to be open to new and better things.'"

Comments

Re:One question

[roman_mir]

Marriage and divorce are very much an economic issue. Used to be a woman got married and she didn't have to go to work, she'd stay home.

Now there is no such advantage (and for most women it was a welcome advantage), now the wives must work to pay their husbands' taxes (post tax revenue of an average couple is about the same as pre-tax income of the husband). What's the point in getting and staying married if it has no clear economic benefit to the woman?

It's all about economics. Women went into the work force in the late seventies, that's what allowed the economy to restructure and prolong itself a bit, but it's not a good consequence of the worsening economy obviously that people have to work more to get less, but you can thank the government for that, with all the inflation, taxes, regulations, which pushed productive jobs elsewhere.