With the results of the UVA Marriage Pact recently released, there has been a lot of discussion about matches. The Marriage Pact says that it is difficult to meet people during coronavirus, and it wants to help that. I believe there were questions about whether you are single and how much you wanted to meet the person you would potentially be matched with, and these questions were clearly designed to get people to reveal their preferences.
Part of the difficulty of dating is that it can be hard to know what the other person wants, how interested they are, or even what they are really like. And it can be hard to know if you yourself are interested sometimes! Because of all this preference concealment and uncertainty, there is a tremendous amount of resource misallocation in dating. Time, money, thoughts, and decisions are used in ways that can ultimately end up without benefit to you if the relationship does not work out. You could argue that the goal of dating is getting rents similar to the rent policies Tullock describes in his paper on rent seeking. The economic rents here are the returns of a relationship, which are presumably greater than the opportunity costs of attaining them. But there are so many failed attempts at relationships, which are similar to Tullock's deadweight losses. I don’t think failed relationships or attempts at relationships are a complete loss, so the analogy breaks down there, but there are undeniably a lot of wasted resources because of preference concealment and uncertainty. The UVA Marriage Pact tried to overcome that with questions designed to reveal preferences. The thought was that people would want to answer honestly and their preferences would be revealed. Only time will tell whether the Marriage Pact has been successful for the participants. I would say if it helps anyone it will be worth it, because I too think the returns of relationships are greater than the opportunity cost of attainment. I wish everyone the best.
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