Swipe Right on Paul Oyer

Looking to pick up a book for some fun econ reading? I would highly recommend Paul Oyer’s Everything I Ever Needed to Know About Economics I Learned From Online Dating. This book brings some of the concepts looked at across economics classes and applies them to dating. The book is engaging funny and easy to follow even for a non-economics major. IT is structured by the concept and all concepts have an example of the economics concept in dating and in a separate industry.

My favorite two topics covered were cheap talk and network externalities. Cheap talk is the idea that there is little cost to lying, or stretching the truth a little, and there is a high benefit. This is why you see so many people lying about income or height. Great article on Cheap talk in advertising here: http://www.dartmouth.edu/~jzinman/Papers/snowed_aug2013.pdf

The network externalities chapter talks about the pricing structure of dating apps. It explains how they function, collect revenue and why social networks once populated have a hard time failing.

This book is taught in Andrew Monaco’s economics of online dating class and is usable in Behavioral economics, IO, and game theory.

https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/paul-oyer-what-online-dating-can-teach-about-economics

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