A market that is not quite a market

If you have to be a thing, there is one consolation — being an expensive thing, a very expensive one.

— A. N. Ostrovsky, “Without a Dowry”

In the evening the app shows a person two hundred faces. In the morning he complains that there is nobody to choose from. There is no contradiction here: two hundred profiles are not yet two hundred available partners. Some live too far away. Some are looking for an entirely different kind of relationship. Some will never see your profile. Some will see it and not answer. With some there will be an exchange of messages that ends after “how was your day?”. Only a handful get as far as meeting. Fewer still get to a second meeting. But the interface itself is built like a market. There is a catalogue, filters, a scarcity of attention, comparison of offers and quick rejection. “Relationships are a market” sounds cynical, but it captures those constraints accurately.

The metaphor becomes a problem where it turns into anthropology: as if everyone had a single price, people formed a ranking, and a successful search required raising that price and selling it well.

A market of thirty people

The economic model of search starts with a person’s surroundings. Nobody chooses from all of humanity. Choice happens among those you can meet, get to know and consider mutually. Picture a small town where the age group you are interested in contains thirty potential partners. Five are already in relationships. Ten you barely cross paths with. Several more are looking for something else. The real set of options quickly shrinks to a number you could seat at one long table. Moving to a university town, changing profession or the arrival of an app changes that set. The person has not become better looking, smarter or kinder. What changed is the market around him — the density of contacts, the composition of the group and the cost of meeting someone.

At this point the language of markets is accurate. It explains why a person can go years without meeting anyone suitable and then, after moving, get several mutual introductions in a month. What changed is the set of reachable options, not a human “score”. Search costs are real too. Getting to know someone takes time, attention and emotional effort. Every new conversation competes with other conversations, sleep, friends, children and work. When apps cut the cost of first contact almost to zero, they do something useful: they bring together people who would otherwise never have met.

The problem appears at the next step. Seeing a profile got cheaper; getting to know a person did not.

Two buyers, two sellers

With an ordinary good, one side evaluates and the other accepts the price or walks away. In dating each person chooses and also depends on somebody else’s choice. A’s decision that B is ideal gives the couple almost nothing until B answers in kind. Mass attractiveness brings attention, but mutuality with the person you want lives in a different quantity.

A good has a price expressed in a common currency. Attractiveness has no such currency. Height, voice, the way someone argues, attitude to children, smell, profession and the ability to shut up at the right moment do not add up to a number in the same way for every observer. Even where ratings partly agree, the weight of each feature depends on who is looking and what they want. The phrase “market value” quietly mixes three different things:

how many people generally notice you;

how many people who suit you are within reach;

how likely mutuality is with one particular person.

The first quantity can be high and the third low. A person collects hundreds of likes and finds nobody he wants to spend a Sunday with. Another is almost invisible to a wide audience but extremely attractive to the narrow circle whose life and taste match his. A market counts attention, while relationships depend on two private valuations coinciding.

The literal price

The commodity metaphor has a historical memory. For a long time marriage was a contract between families, and the private choice of two people came second. In some societies property passed to the groom’s family as a dowry, in others the groom’s family paid a bride price to the bride’s family. Labour, land, inheritance and an alliance of clans really were part of the deal. The direction of payment, though, varied from society to society. That is a useful detail. If women or men were “goods” by nature, money would not flow in opposite directions under different institutions.

The economic logic does not disappear here. It describes the structure of the exchange, not the price of a person. Families insured risks, transferred property, bought alliances and fixed responsibility for future children. When property rights, earnings and divorce changed, the old payments weakened. The vocabulary of price outlived the institution that once made it literal. A modern person may have neither a dowry nor a family council and still talk about himself as an asset: “my value has gone up”, “I’m not in her league”, “there’s demand for that type right now”. The language is convenient because it turns uncertainty into a ranking. If it did not work out, you can decide the price was too low. That diagnosis is easier than admitting that a particular mutuality depends on the composition of the environment, on timing and on the combination of two people.

A good courier, a bad appraiser

The market lens is useful in three places. It shows the available environment: where there are almost no people with the goals you want, self-improvement will not fix the composition of the sample, and you will have to change channels and networks. It accounts for the cost of search: a hundred message threads compete with sleep, work and children, and more often produce exhaustion than a hundred relationships. Finally, it is a reminder about the shortage of information. A profile shows a prepared shop window; behaviour under exhaustion, keeping promises and the ability to share space become visible over time. This is where reputation, mutual acquaintances and repeat meetings acquire value.

Apps here work as couriers. They deliver people to each other. The advertising copy turns the courier into an appraiser, promising to match compatibility from a questionnaire. There is noticeably less data behind that promise. Raising your own price is pointless here. It is more useful to work out which constraint is blocking the search. Too few suitable people means the environment has to be widened; contacts that never turn into meetings mean friction has to be reduced; plenty of meetings that produce no clarity mean more time has to go into getting to know people. Attention from people with different goals points at your signal and your channel, not at your value.

A person is not a commodity. But he searches within a limited set, pays time for information and depends on mutual choice. The market describes those constraints well enough. The price list appears only after the model has run out.

Main sources

Finkel, E. J., Eastwick, P. W., Karney, B. R., Reis, H. T., & Sprecher, S. (2012). Online dating: A critical analysis from the perspective of psychological science. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 13(1), 3–66; Rosenfeld, M. J., Thomas, R. J., & Hausen, S. (2019). Disintermediating your friends: How online dating in the United States displaces other ways of meeting. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 116(36), 17753–17758; Bruch, E. E., & Newman, M. E. J. (2018). Aspirational pursuit of mates in online dating markets. Science Advances, 4(8), eaap9815.

Becker, G. S. (1991). A Treatise on the Family. Harvard University Press; Akerlof, G. A. (1970). The market for “lemons”: Quality uncertainty and the market mechanism. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 84(3), 488–500.