Dollars and Sex (9 page)

Again, the economic approach yields counterintuitive advice; it recommends that in order to lower the rate of casual sex and raise the rate of traditional dating on campus colleges, they should encourage the enrollment of more students who are naturally inclined to be promiscuous, that is, men.

My final example of how useful this information is for those who want to make informed decisions stems from the recognition that the college sex market is not an entirely free market in the sense that it is subject to the outside influence of government policy. Governments have the power to influence college sex markets through laws that control the distribution and taxation of alcohol. You might very well feel that governments have no business in the bedrooms of the nation. However, if specific alcohol policies (like having a legal drinking age of 21) are leading to binge drinking and, as a result, higher rates of promiscuity on college campuses, then changing those policies is not, in the market sense, interfering in the sex lives of the individual. On the contrary, it is removing an existing market distortion that has already shifted the equilibrium away from the one that would be found in free market.

Again, applying the statistical tools used by economists leads us to a counterintuitive recommendation—alcohol prohibitions that encourage binge drinking should be removed if governments feel that promiscuity imposes too high a cost on students and society.

Eventually, almost everyone decides it is time to search for a longer-term relationship (and the possibility of more frequent sex!). When that happens, many people will consider using the Internet to find themselves a mate. And for that, I thank them. Online dating has provided economists with a virtual treasure trove of data with which to untangle the desires of the human heart. It is a little voyeuristic, I admit, but you might just see a little bit of yourself in the next chapter, in which we will take an economic view of love in the era of cyberspace.

3
Only about 42 percent of Canadian university students are male, but for some reason, male students have made up 66 percent of the students in my Economics of Sex and Love class.

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Results tabulated by Donald Cox.

HOW ONLINE DATING DIFFERS FROM BUYING SWEETS

It would be a lie for me to tell you that I have been single so long that it is starting to get embarrassing—it
started
to be embarrassing a long time ago, and now it is just plain awkward. This seems like the type of information you might want to hide on a first date, like an eating disorder or the fact that you used to smoke a lot of pot. But just like a job interview, prospective mates want to know what experience you bring to the “position.” And while few people are looking for a new partner who has had a string of lovers in the past six months, you have to admit that a (very) long period without dating makes one look like the car that has been sitting in the lot all year-round—probably a lemon.

Personally, I need to come up with an excuse for this protracted period without a partner. My friends tell me that mine (“I've been too busy”) is not very convincing and that I need to come up with a more creative explanation, something more appealing that prospective buyers will believe, like “I've just been loving the single life!”

Of course, I could just tell them the truth: that my rational mind has a problem with looking for love online and since that is where almost everyone else in my age group is looking, I am little out of luck.

It is not that I am judgmental of online love seekers; I am not, and I know that many people are finding love online. My problem is this: When rational decision makers are faced with a large number of options, they like to simplify. How do they do that? They use a process of elimination.

Let me use an analogy to illustrate why, for me personally, this is a problem.

Looking for a mate on an online dating site is like looking for a sweet in a pastry shop. In both cases, I wouldn't know exactly what I was looking for at the beginning of the search, and so I would simplify the decision-making process by eliminating some of the possibilities. When there is a large variety of treats, or potential partners, I wouldn't just eliminate individual possibilities, because that would be very time-consuming, but rather larger categories of possibilities. The difference between the two situations is that in the pastry shop, the categories of treats I have eliminated don't disappear altogether—they stay in the case in front of me, making it impossible to ignore how delicious they must be.

For example, I would never just walk into a pastry shop and declare, “I will have a chocolate-raspberry macaron!” Instead, I might look around and decide that I don't really want a cookie because I can easily make those at home and so eliminate cookies as a possible treat. Then I might think that I really like chocolate-covered caramels, but I already had chocolate this week. And so I'd take chocolates off the list of possible treats as well. I would continue to eliminate categories of treats until all I was left with, say, are éclairs and fruit tarts.

If on that particular day neither éclairs nor fruit tarts appeal to me, however, I wouldn't just leave the shop feeling sad that while everyone else seems to find treats, I am going home empty-handed. No, I would take another look around and decide that what I really want, after all, is a chocolate-raspberry macaron, despite previously disavowing both cookies and chocolate, and I'd go home happy with my treat selection.

Decision making on online dating sites proceeds along the same lines, but the problem of choice is far more insidious. Online people are rejected as possible partners without ever having been seen—not because
of who they are but because they have characteristics that fall into a broader category that was eliminated in order to make the search less time consuming.

If shopping for treats worked the same way as online dating sites, before I even started to consider my options I would have already filtered out the cookies by refining my search (literally, by using the site's search filter) to “Things I can't make at home.” And I would have screened for “Treats I haven't had recently.” So, both macarons and chocolates would appear to be unavailable. At the end of the screening process, I would be left with a couple of choices, éclairs and tarts, that didn't really interest me that day. What would I do then? Probably walk away with a sense of resignation about my treat-free existence, believing that no pastry shop out there produces the perfect treat for me.

When I consider the men in my life whom I have really loved, and there have been a couple, I honestly believe that they never would have survived a filtered search on an online dating site. They would have been too young or had too little education. They would have been the wrong religion or not nearly tall enough. Or they would have been underemployed or lived too far away.

Just as important, I doubt I would have survived their searches either.

My guess is that, after a little reflection, you would agree that many of the people in your life who have made you happy—including possibly the person you are with right now—wouldn't pass muster based on a “must have” list that was searchable online. This is because online searches encourage us to find qualities that are easy to measure: age, height, education, race, income, etc. The quality of a relationship, however, is more about experiential qualities than it is about empirical qualities, and those are much harder to quantify and to search for online. This is why many online dating sites are now trying to capture experiential qualities by using search algorithms, but even those sites still allow searchers to screen out potential matches who fail to meet their quantitative criteria.

From an economics perspective, limited searches take “thick” markets and turn them into “thin” markets. The fact that online dating markets are thick should imply, in theory at least, that not only is it easier to find love on that market compared with a more traditional dating market but also that the relationships that form there are of a higher quality.

When we limit our searches, for example, when we only contact people who share our ethnicity, we create artificially thin dating markets—markets where there are few buyers and sellers—and it is difficult to settle on a price at which everyone is willing to trade. Not only do thin markets clear slowly, if at all, but also the matches that form on those markets are likely to be of lower quality.

Personally, I would like to limit my searches to “Men who feel soft and smell good when I roll over in the morning,” but even if I could, I suspect that when I filtered for “Men who are not hurt when I find their blunders hilarious,” there would be no one left on the list for me to consider.

And this, pretty much, explains why I am still single after all these years.

ONLINE DATING AS A JOURNEY OF SELF-DISCOVERY

My consternation about this process aside, as mate seekers we do limit our searches when faced with a large number of choices on any market. While this behavior may confound the search for a perfect mate, the beauty of it—from an economist's perspective—is that these searches generate extraordinary data that can be used to understand an individual's preferences for a mate.

They give economists an opportunity to observe the market for sex and love in action and help us understand how buyers and sellers on that market ultimately engage in trade (i.e., settle with a partner).