Price of Anarchy in Algorithmic Matching of Romantic Partners

01/08/2019
by   Andres Abeliuk, et al.
0

Algorithmic-matching sites offer users access to an unprecedented number of potential mates. However, they also pose a principal-agent problem with a potential moral hazard. The agent's interest is to maximize usage of the Web site, while the principal's interest is to find the best possible romantic partners. This creates a conflict of interest: optimally matching users would lead to stable couples and fewer singles using the site, which is detrimental for the online dating industry. Here, we borrow the notion of Price-of-Anarchy from game theory to quantify the decrease in social efficiency of online dating sites caused by the agent's self-interest. We derive theoretical bounds on the price-of-anarchy, showing it can be bounded by a constant that does not depend on the number of users of the dating site. This suggests that as online dating sites grow, their potential benefits scale up without sacrificing social efficiency. Further, we performed experiments involving human subjects in a matching market, and compared the social welfare achieved by an optimal matching service against a self-interest matching algorithm. We show that by introducing competition among dating sites, the selfish behavior of agents aligns with its users, and social efficiency increases.

READ FULL TEXT
research
07/06/2020

Online Learning of Facility Locations

In this paper, we provide a rigorous theoretical investigation of an onl...
research
04/25/2018

Stable-Matching Voronoi Diagrams: Combinatorial Complexity and Algorithms

We study algorithms and combinatorial complexity bounds for stable-match...
research
08/15/2019

When Your Friends Become Sellers: An Empirical Study of Social Commerce Site Beidian

Past few years have witnessed the emergence and phenomenal success of st...
research
03/03/2022

High Welfare Matching Markets via Descending Price

We consider design of monetary mechanisms for two-sided matching. Mechan...
research
07/12/2011

Funding Games: the Truth but not the Whole Truth

We introduce the Funding Game, in which m identical resources are to be ...
research
11/11/2021

Classification of URL bitstreams using Bag of Bytes

Protecting users from accessing malicious web sites is one of the import...
research
07/11/2019

The Geography of Love: Decoding the Spatial Pattern and Digital Self in Chinese Online Courtship

The evolution of Chinese online courtship culture is a mixed product und...

Please sign up or login with your details

Forgot password? Click here to reset