The Economics of Dating Apps: Love in the Age of Algorithms

The Economics of Dating Apps: Love in the Age of Algorithms

By: Rishita Arora

Forget candlelight dinners, coffee dates and cute encounters at bookstores, modern romance now lives on a 6-inch screen. Dating apps aren’t just connecting people, they’re recasting our thoughts about relationships, value, and choice in ways that sound more like economics than actual romance.

Love isn’t just about chemistry and compatibility; it’s about swipes, supply, demand and even branding. With millions of profiles competing for attention, people are marketing themselves like products; polishing photos, bios, and interests the way firms curate ads. Here, matches are scarce resources, your time is currency, and attention has become the new gold standard

Love as a Marketplace

Economists have long studied matching markets, systems where people aren’t just buying products but searching for suitable partners, whether in jobs, colleges, or marriages. In these markets, systems where success isn’t about simply buying something off the shelf; it’s about mutual agreement and mutual involvement. 

Dating apps like Bumble, Tinder and Hinge have become digital bazaars of romance, where love is sold and algorithms act like modern-day matchmakers, guiding who sees whom and when.

But here’s the catch: love isn’t like ordering a pizza; you can’t just “place an order” and expect delivery. Both parties must agree to participate, making this a two-sided market.

Just like in Uber riders need drivers, and drivers need riders to function, dating platforms require a critical involvement of both men and women. Also, maintaining a balance is a necessity, a large number of riders and few drivers leads to longer wait times and system collapse, similarly, too many men on a dating app with fewer women leads to intense competition and reduced satisfaction.

In this sense, dating apps don’t just host romance; they actively engineer the market’s structure. They set the “rules of the game” and shape the algorithm controlling who gets noticed, who connects, and, ultimately, who ends up finding love.

 Supply, Demand, and Scarcity in Romance

The supply of profiles is infinite on dating apps, but what’s actually limited is attention. Just as in economics, scarcity increases the value of a good. Every swipe is a decision about how to allocate this scarce resource. A clever bio, polished photos, or a witty opener work like branding in dating markets (just like advertising of a product). 

They signal quality, make you standout and increase your “demand” in an oversaturated marketplace. But this market is not evenly balanced. Data consistently shows that women receive more matches and unlimited attention, while men compete more fiercely for visibility. In economic terms, the “demand” for women’s profiles is often more than the “supply,” creating an imbalance that directly shapes app design.

That’s where monetization strategies come in. Bumble’s “women-first” rule isn’t just a social feature; it’s a way to smooth the market by reducing message overload for women while encouraging more balanced engagement. Similarly, Tinder’s premium boosts and paid visibility tools allow men (the side that faces higher competition) to be at a better position in the market, an intervention just like the government policies of subsidies, quotas, or price floors to correct imbalances in real-world economies.

Hence, dating apps don’t just simply mirror the market, they manage it. By designing rules, selling advantages, and controlling visibility, they play the role of both matchmaker and regulator, consequently profiting from the very scarcity they create.

Information Asymmetry: What You See vs. What You Get

George Akerlof’s classic “market for lemons” highlighted what happens when buyers can’t distinguish between high-quality and low-quality goods and eventually the bad products rule out the good ones, and the whole market suffers. Dating apps face the same problem. A profile can be extremely filtered, a bio may exaggerate achievements, and intentions might not match as to what is advertised.

This creates information asymmetry as one side knows more about themselves than the other does. 

The outcome is adverse selection: genuine users get driven out by misrepresentation, while low-effort or dishonest profiles remain in circulation, wasting time and energy.

To counter this problem, apps introduce signals of quality like Verification badges that work like third-party certifications, reassuring users that the person is real. Prompt-based bios and personality questions lower ambiguity, making it harder to fake compatibility. Features like “most compatible” recommendations use algorithms and pretend like matchmakers, attempting to align intentions and reduce mismatches.

In essence, these mechanisms function as market correctors. Just like regulators maintain quality standards to keep defective goods from entering or dominating the market, dating apps intervene to maintain trust in the marketplace of love.

Love with a price tag

Most dating apps run on a freemium (or free) model as the basic service of swiping is free, but other premium features like super likes, boosts, or unlimited swipes come at a cost. This is a real life example of price differentiation. Those willing (or desperate) to pay signal higher demand for visibility, much like firms that spend heavily on advertising to grab maximum consumer attention.

But the economics here go deeper. These features work on two powerful concepts: scarcity and impatience. Can’t wait for matches? Or Tired of struggling in an overcrowded market? Buy a boost to rise above the noise..

This strategy turns love into a layered marketplace, where outcomes aren’t only shaped by chemistry or compatibility, but also by willingness and ability to pay. In doing so, apps blur the line between matchmaking and market-making, extracting value from the very human desire to connect.

When Love Meets Economics

Dating apps may feel like cute swiping games, but deep down they mirror the dynamics of real economies in terms of supply, demand, scarcity, pricing strategies and inefficiencies. Every swipe is an allocation of attention, every premium feature is a form of differentiated pricing and every profile is a product competing for demand.

And just as in traditional markets, platforms act not just as facilitators but as regulators, setting the rules, rationing visibility, and monetizing desperation. Love in theory may be, priceless, but in this digital age of algorithms, the search for connection is managed by a very modern invisible hand: one that belongs not to destiny or fate, but to the bazaars of romance.

Written & Published by: Rishita Arora

Image Courtesy: Pinterest