Dating is a form of human courtship consisting of social activities done by two persons with the aim of each assessing the other's suitability as a partner in an intimate relationship or as a spouse. It is a specialized meeting system where the objective of the meeting, be it live or phone or chat based, is to go on a live date with someone, with usually romantic implications. The rapid march of technology has changed every aspect of our lives in the last couple of decades, relationship and dating are no different. Nowadays people use technology to plan dating, be it mobile phone or internet. Recently, "couple-dating" and "friend-dating" systems have also become popular, especially among those who met on dating systems and enjoy the interactions, but have settled down with mates.
The history of dating is as interesting as the history of technologies that support dating system. Live dating systems or methods are usually not considered as separate from the matchmaking process, which often employs games, rules and rituals in many cultures.
A notable and recent live dating system that does not seem to have arisen in traditional matchmaking is speed dating, which relies to some degree on the transportation and communication facilities of a modern society, and reflects its accelerated pace of life.
These live dating systems do not typically impose a great deal of structure on the actual interaction between the individuals considering dating.
This paper focuses on the Internet dating system.
[...] The market itself is specific. Firstly, this market is radically volatile; in the sense that transactions can be multilateral and people know it for sure. They may think to be engaged in a unilateral transaction, while the other partner is negotiating with several others. Furthermore, the particularity of this market comes from the marginal role of money. Apart from transaction costs (the monthly subscription to the dating site), money is not involved. The service is not traded for money; as what is looked for on the dating site is the best partner promising to produce a good produced, namely love. [...]
[...] The advent of online and newspaper-based dating exacerbates the problem of adverse selection. In order to lure more desirable partners, embellishing one's own desirability seems to represent a reasonable strategy, however ethically questionable. By the time the disappointing real-life introduction occurs, each partner has invested so much time into the Internet courtship that he or she may be willing to accept someone who does not meet their expectations. This in turn renders the strategy of embellishment even more attractive to the participants of such services. [...]
[...] Even with much larger pools of hopeful singles, such as those on an online dating or social networking site, the algorithm could match individuals using an ordinal set of preferences declared by each participant after browsing all other members' profiles. In this case, not only are the rankings generated by each member likely to be inaccurate, but the adverse selection problem itself might worsen. The fact that participants whose profiles are of lower desirability will become paired with similarly undesirable dates will predispose more people to lie and to do so to a greater degree. [...]
[...] Conclusion The problems of risk and uncertainty are numerous in the online dating market. In fact, this market, aimed at erase the “first step” obstacle, seems too flexible. We could even say that it is unstable. The main player tries, paradoxically, to secure the negotiation by finding ways to avoid the huge competition in the market, by continuing the negotiation outside the market. Information asymmetry and moral hazard remain important. Nevertheless, it seems that these problems are inherent to this new market, whose fundamental aspect is high flexibility. [...]
[...] Dating sites like meetic.com or match.com, on a world scale, and like lexa.nl on a Dutch scale are now among the most successful sites. The principle of this market, as every market, is to enable demand and supply to meet each other. Specific to this market is that it is aimed at the encounter of supply and demand in the area of romance. Each user creates a “profile” on a dating site, which enables him/her to see the profiles of the other members, to send them messages, finally to chat with them, with the aim to establish a precarious relation of trust and eventually to plan a date. [...]
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