By Probal Mojumder and Ravi Bapna
Dating is relevant to human relationships as an avenue to search for a life partner. Today’s digitized world has created dating markets on the Internet to help people find romantic relationships online. Online dating allows for new types of levers that are absent in its offline counterpart. For instance, in online dating, the communication happens through viewing, messaging, and liking as the forms of agency than say, acknowledging someone for the first time with a glance or a smile, as commonplace in the offline world. This shift from traditional to online dating has opened new insights into an age-old social process for social scientists.
What happens if your secret admirers are secret no more? To address this interesting question a group of international researchers (professors Ravi Bapna from University of Minnesota, Edward McFowland III from Harvard University, Probal Mojumder from Indian Institute of Management Udaipur, Jui Ramaprasad from University of Maryland, and Akhmed Umyarov) embarked on a joint effort towards finding the impact of an essential online dating feature – ‘Who Likes You’. In essence, this feature reveals the identity of any person who sends a ‘like’. Here, it might get complicated, so let us elaborate a little.
In online dating platforms, a user can ‘like’ or ‘dislike’ the picture of a potential mate (this process happens like a carousel, where the user gets exposed to a series of pictures of potential mates). In the default scenario, this user (say the targeting user) is hiding behind the veil of computer algorithms such that the ‘like’-receiving user (say the focal user) does not know who the targeting user is! It is similar to our offline experience, where someone may internally like a person, but that liked-person never gets to know about it (sort of like that secret admirer you might have had).
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The researchers breached this default phenomenon with the help of a large-scale (involving millions of users) randomized control trial (RCT) in collaboration with a North American online dating company such that the focal users can see the identity of the targeting users. Why is this interesting? Firstly, this departs from the constraints of the offline world where it is near impossible to guess the identity of the secret admirer. Additionally, this phenomenon suggests that the information asymmetries of the offline dating world can be dissolved away with technology features like – ‘Who Likes You’.
Does this improve matching outcomes for the typical users? What behavior changes can we observe in the online dating platform because of this treatment? Firstly, and this is very significant, the researchers found that the treatment causes women to send 7.4% more messages. This breaks age-old social norms where men (in hetero-sexual dating markets) are almost wired to make the first move. It’s a highly desirable market improvement, given that men send double the number of messages as compared to women. In essence, women become more proactive, and display agency, which is likely to result in several downstream benefits.
The findings get further nuanced. When a person’s identity is revealed, the focal users can view the desirability of that person. Here, desirability simply means how attractive a person is. This can easily be done via viewing the profile picture or visiting the profile of the targeting user. Typical dating profiles contains the user’s personal information and answers to relevant questions, which can reveal their desirability to other users.
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Now, when the researchers combine the desirability of both the focal user and the targeting users, they find out a series of nuanced effects like sorting, encouragement and discouragement. They find that for focal users, when they interact with targeting user of similar desirability, the focal user’s matches increase significantly. This is the well-known sorting effect, mimicking the well-known English proverb – birds of a feather flock together.
It gets more interesting, when a dyadic-pair has unequal desirabilities. Let’s say, a focal female user gets ‘like’ from a more desirable targeting male user. This triggers an encouragement effect. Thus, here, the focal female user is encouraged to match more at the dating platform due to the treatment. The reverse is also true – when targeting male users are relatively less desirable, the researchers observes a discouragement effect for the focal female users, as their matches reduce significantly. The implication from this is that sites can be more proactive in deciding who to recommend to whom so as to avoid discouragement.
The findings of the research suggest that digitization of an age-old social process like dating brings with it new insights that can help us shape desirable outcomes. Here, the ‘Who Likes You’ digital feature, which is among a plethora of online platform features, causally drives human behavior in directions that were previously unknown. The downstream impact of such subtle changes can only be witnessed by future generations in their macro societal outcomes of existence. In present times, the researchers are just scratching the surface of the possibilities of our digital lifestyles.
Currently, this research, titled “So, Who Likes You? Evidence from a Randomized Field Experiment,” has received acceptance for publication by the Management Science journal.
(Authors – Probal Mojumder is currently an Assistant Professor of Information Systems at the Indian Institute of Management Udaipur and Ravi Bapna is currently the Curtis L. Carlson Chair in Business Analytics and Information Systems and Professor at the Carlson School of Management, University of Minnesota. Views expressed are personal and do not reflect the official position or policy of the FinancialExpress.com.)
