Recently, I’ve been thinking about the frustration people feel with dating in the 21st century. I’m certainly frustrated, and I think I’ve come up with a decent economic model that helps explain it. I think I can explain a lot of what’s going on, from women’s higher standards, to the rise of looks-based dating (including the anthropological discussion about men turning to plastic surgery), to the increasing number of single men. I hope that at least one of the comparative statics will be interesting, though for some of you this may seem obvious. Note that all of this is about monogamous dating.

The model I propose is a two-sided matching model, merged with elements of a job search model and a model of private information. People have preferences over two things: an observed characteristic (such as looks or photos) and an unobserved characteristic (such as personality). Suppose that their preference strength is increasing and proportional to their own value (a weighted average of observed and unobserved value); similar valued people are willing to date similar valued people.

In a typical job search model, the optimal strategy is to hold out until you get an offer above your “reservation wage.” The concept of reservation values is particularly useful here, since it explains many dynamics in the dating market. In this case, it represents the minimum physical attractiveness (quality of the observed characteristic) of a person you’d be willing to date. But unlike the standard job search model, which has only one searcher and one fully observed characteristic (the wage), dating introduces additional complexities.

Here, the unobserved characteristic (personality) can only be discovered at a cost. You can form rough estimates of personality through different strategies: stalking someone on Instagram or LinkedIn (low cost), texting them (medium cost), or going on a date (high cost). Because it takes effort to learn someone’s “true” value, both the distribution of personality traits and the relative weight people place on personality become central.

Reservation value represents the minimum physical attractiveness of a person you’d be willing to date. You can sub in "beauty standards" every time "reservation value" is mentioned.

Now let’s consider what happens to reservation values of physical attractiveness in this setup.

Model Implications on Beauty Stand

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