Love is Blind: Search And Matching in Online Dating

Abstract

Using data on user search and matching histories from an online dating site, we study the role of information on matching platforms, emphasizing how partial or full information about the other side influences the final matching outcomes. We find that more information about the other side may make matching outcomes worse. This effect is mainly driven by the misaligned preferences (i.e., preference mismatch) between the two sides. Our findings suggest that there exists an optimal amount of information that the platform should provide to each side before a match is proposed. A consumer theory model is developed to rationalize the behavior and shed light on the optimal information provision strategies.