Matching and Sorting in Online Dating

This paper studies the economics of match formation using a novel dataset obtained from a major online dating service. Online dating takes place in a new market environment that has become a common means to find a date or a marriage partner. According to comScore (2006), 17 percent of all North American and 18 percent of all European Internet users visited an online personals site in July 2006. In the United States, 37 percent of all single Internet users looking for a partner have visited a dating Web site (Mary Madden and Amanda Lenhart 2006). The Web site we study provides detailed information on the users’ attributes and interactions, which we use to estimate a rich model of mate preferences. Based on the preference estimates, we then examine whether an economic matching model can explain the observed online matching patterns, and we evaluate the efficiency of the matches obtained on the Web site. Finally, we explore whether the estimated preferences and a matching model are helpful in understanding sorting patterns observed “offline,” among dating and married couples. Two distinct literatures motivate this study. The first is the market design literature, which focuses on designing and evaluating the performance of market institutions. A significant branch of this literature is devoted to matching markets (Alvin E. Roth and Marilda A. O. Sotomayor 1990), with the goal of understanding the allocation mechanism in a particular market, and assessing whether an alternative mechanism with better theoretical properties (typically in terms Matching and Sorting in Online Dating