Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Few decisions are more important than the selection of a romantic partner. It determines the quality of long-term relationships between adults, the offspring produced from those relationships, and how those offspring will be raised. Yet the process of partner selection—dating—has undergone little academic scrutiny and has not benefited from helpful innovations that might result from rigorous policy analysis. A combination of social inertia, gender norms, and cues from market-driven media have amorphously dictated our dating landscape, with meaningful inefficiencies persisting in the absence of strategic reevaluation. The resulting costs of these inefficiencies, both known and unknown, have consequences for individual happiness, the well-being of the family, and society as a whole. Applying a public policy lens and the rigor of economic analysis to the institution of dating could optimize the dating experience and create beneficial downstream effects for the family.

This analysis uses game theory to provide a framework for understanding the inefficiencies in modern dating. In a two-player game where both players can either cooperate (continue dating) or defect (cease dating), we analyze why a person chooses to defect when they should cooperate, or cooperate when they should defect. This is modeled as a finitely repeated game using decision trees, focusing on how a single player evaluates the probabilities and payoffs associated with given moves. We evaluate the risks associated with “Type I” and “Type II” dating errors, with Type I error defined as players continuing to date when they should stop, and Type II error defined as ending the dating process when they should continue. The analysis concludes using other economic models and behavioral economics to assess why players make irrational decisions and explores potential optimal dating strategies that ameliorate irrational human behavior and lead to socially-optimal Nash equilibria.