Publications

Income Attraction: An Online Dating Field Experiment

ARTICLE | Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization | Vol. 111, 2015

Abstract

We measured gender differences in preferences for mate income ex-ante to interaction(“income attraction”) in a field experiment on one of China’s largest online dating websites.To rule out unobserved factors correlated with income as the basis of attraction, we ran-domly assigned income levels to 360 artificial profiles and recorded the incomes of nearly4000 “visits” to full versions of these profiles from search engine results, which displayedabbreviated versions. We found that men of all income levels visited our female profilesof different income levels at roughly equal rates. In contrast, women of all income levelsvisited our male profiles with higher incomes at higher rates. Surprisingly, these higherrates increased with the women’s own incomes and even jumped discontinuously whenthe male profiles’ incomes went above that of the women’s own. Our male profiles withthe highest level of income received 10 times more visits than the lowest. This gender dif-ference in ex-ante preferences for mate income could help explain marriage and spousalincome patterns found in prior empirical studies.

Key words: Online dating, Field experiment, Gender differences, Matching, Marriagea