Self-Selection: The Player Herds on Dating Sites Part 3

Let’s continue the discussion about self-selection. Here’s another example:

If you have a lemon of a car (a vehicle with hidden problems), you’ll be more likely to put it on the second hand market in a bid to quietly get rid of it. Other people who also have defective cars will try to do the same. So before you know it, the used car lot will be full of money-pits waiting for poor unsuspecting buyers.

Economists have long tried to predict human behaviours (and their financial consequences) by studying their nature. In the same way, you can predict the behaviour of players in the dating market based on who they are.

The very fact that players prefer casual relationships, and are afraid of commitment, guarantees that they’ll stay on the dating site and flock to new girls like a group of salivating wolverines. That’s why it is inevitable for sites to get more and more players as time goes on, despite the efforts to keep it clean.

The way to mix things up is to keep bringing in new members (and real spouse material) into the site. That can be achieved by doing such a great job at matchmaking that old customers refer their single friends to the site. There’s really no advertisement like word of mouth.

(continued in my next post...)