How Deep Is Your Love?

You cannot win at life without winning in relationships. Of course winning in relationships means something different for everyone. From the player to the monogamist and from the romantic to the pragmatist, people find value in different types of interactions and arrangements. Despite this variation, relationships have a huge impact on how all individuals experience the world.

The world of romantic relationships is made extra interesting by its widely monogamous quality, which adds a layer of competition beyond the world of friendships, and its personal nature, which adds a charge of emotion beyond the world of purely professional relationships.

As someone interested in maximizing life, profit, ROI, happiness, value, etc., I will always be interested in how people find and leave one another, along with how people build priceless value through love and loyalty and create devastating pain through dishonesty, miscommunication, and betrayal.

The dating world, with its unique mix of strategy, competition, cooperation, and emotion, is a fascinating place to observe sociological, economic, and psychological phenomena. So I wrote a paper about it (well, just a couple of aspects of it).

My paper, How Deep Is Your Love? Loss Aversion in Dating Markets, touches on the psychology of dating, compares online dating with its traditional alternative, explores the economic concepts of loss aversion and the endowment effect in the context of the dating market, and uses experimental methods to evaluate how the salience of alternative dating opportunities affects people's attitudes and decisions in the market. See the abstract and full paper here.

I may dabble in research on the dating market again, but I also think that if I get too wrapped up in studying this particular world in an academic way, with some sort of scientific method, I might end up not understanding it at all.