Is Online Dating Giving Us Too Much Choice?

PJ Vogt brought up an important question in the latest Freakonomics Podcast that I don't think their economist guest, Oyer, understood that PJ was asking. PJ wasn't wondering if in a smaller town, where there were fewer options, you'd be more likely to find a better match - it's obvious that you could find a better match with more options. Just like you could find a better TV for yourself at ten stores with 20 options each than you could at one store with 10 options.

Oyer did address the problem that going to all those stores/dates and checking out all those TVs/matches can take more time if the dating site's aren't doing a fantastic job filtering matches.

What he didn't address was PJ's real question: Is it possible that you'd be more satisfied with the one most compatible girl in the small town than you would be with the most compatible girl from the big city, even supposing that the small town girl and you have only what we'll simplistically call an 80% compatibility rating, whereas the best match in NYC is a 91% (or whatever) because in the small city you will only have the 9 less compatible eligible women to compare your partner to, while in the big city you'll have a bunch of women you met that were almost or at least as good and maybe better in some ways and, inevitably, a whole bunch of women you haven't met, and you can always wonder if somewhere out there there's a 93% (who knows, maybe the 93% isn't on OkCupid!)?

This question is wonderfully addressed in Barry Schwartz' book The Paradox of Choice. I think it's an extremely important question in an age of way too much choice and of people trying to optimize their lives, particularly through attempts to quantify and data-fy aspects of life/brains/bodies/etc. that are too complex to be broken down to a few metrics.

It is not a question of getting the partner with the most compatibility (or the best TV), it's a question of how to be the happiest with the partner (or TV) you do get.