Decoding Love - Andrew Trees [52]
Oddly enough, the whole idea for Decoding Love first began to take shape when I was reading a book about economics—more specifically, a chapter on how game theory is being used by economists to run more effective auctions (that is, more effective from the sellers’ point of view since the new methods are all about squeezing the maximum number of dollars from the buyers). As I read about auctions, a question popped into my mind—why couldn’t you use game theory to help navigate the world of dating? Decoding Love has evolved a long way from that original question. But the core idea of whether or not science could provide better answers about the how and why of dating remained. And this chapter is my attempt to examine that question by using economics and game theory. Even if those two approaches offer no final answers, they can at least give us a clearer understanding of some of the forces at work.
WHY SCIENCE IS BETTER THAN SELF-HELP GUIDES
If you don’t believe me, all we need to do is analyze a few dating books with the tools of economics to see that they are almost woefully simplistic. Take, for instance, that dating sensation of the 1990s, The Rules. As the title suggests, it contained a number of rules to guide women’s behavior when they were dating, rules about how much to talk on the phone and when to go on a date and on and on. This book spawned an entire dating industry—The Rules II, The Rules for Online Dating, The Rules for Marriage, The Rules Dating Journal. Ironically, one of the authors ended up divorced, although, given divorce rates, I would argue that she was a victim of percentages, rather than a victim of her own rules. Looked at from the standpoint of economics, though, only one rule was at work—creating an artificial scarcity to drive up a woman’s market price. All the rules were designed to make the woman less available to men, to create the sense that any time with her was something of great value. I’m not arguing against the effectiveness of this strategy. I’m simply trying to show how, when you strip away the rhetoric, most dating advice is very simple.
And the same lesson applies to dating books for men. As you would expect given the earlier chapters about men’s desire for more frequent and more varied sex, most of these books are written to help men seduce women and not to put them into a long-term relationship. Let me take one representative example, Neil Strauss’s The Game. The book is even printed to look like a bible, as if it contains the eternal secrets of male seduction. As with The Rules, it contains a wealth of complicated techniques. The book becomes incredibly basic, though, when looked at through the lens of economics. It simply applies the logic of the market to dating: it treats each and every encounter with a woman as a negotiation in which you are trying to undermine a woman’s sense of her own value and inflate her sense of your value. Again, I’m not trying to argue that this technique is not effective. I’m sure men who master it are very successful. What I am trying to suggest is that economics and game theory might be able to provide a deeper level of insight.
HOW MUCH FOR THAT DOGGIE IN THE WINDOW
Let’s start with the idea of analyzing dating using that powerful tool first developed by Adam Smith: the market. This is not as strange as it may sound. Attempts to understand relationships using the decidedly unromantic methods of economics have been going on for quite some time. It all began with the economist Gary Becker who wrote an article back