From 2019... Online dating markets: Sex ratio varies widely between submarkets, with younger submarkets having more men & fewer women than older ones; minority women are younger than the average in older submarkets

From 2019... Structure of Online Dating Markets in U.S. Cities. Elizabeth E. Bruch and M. E. J. Newman. Sociological Science, April 2, 2019. 10.15195/v6.a9

Abstract: We study the structure of heterosexual dating markets in the United States through an analysis of the interactions of several million users of a large online dating website, applying recently developed network analysis methods to the pattern of messages exchanged among users. Our analysis shows that the strongest driver of romantic interaction at the national level is simple geographic proximity, but at the local level, other demographic factors come into play. We find that dating markets in each city are partitioned into submarkets along lines of age and ethnicity. Sex ratio varies widely between submarkets, with younger submarkets having more men and fewer women than older ones. There is also a noticeable tendency for minorities, especially women, to be younger than the average in older submarkets, and our analysis reveals how this kind of racial stratification arises through the messaging decisions of both men and women. Our study illustrates how network techniques applied to online interactions can reveal the aggregate effects of individual behavior on social structure.

Check also Men's revealed preference for their mates' ages. Kitae Sohn. Evolution and Human Behavior, Volume 38, Issue 1, January 2017, Pages 58-62. https://www.bipartisanalliance.com/2021/05/we-analyzed-all-first-marriages.html

Discussion

The experience of mate selection is frequently described, both in popular discourse and the scientific literature, in the language of markets: An individual’s goal is to secure the best possible mate for themselves in the face of competition from others. However, we know little about the structure of these romantic markets in part for lack of appropriately detailed data. The advent and vigorous growth of the online dating industry in the last two decades provides a new source of data about courtship interactions on an unprecedented scale. In this study, we have provided a first look at how network analysis techniques can reveal the structure of U.S. dating markets as evidenced by interactions on a popular dating website. Across the United States as a whole, we find that geography is the defining feature of national dating markets. Within cities, submarkets are defined by age as well as other demographic factors—most notably, race. We find that submarket structure is shaped by both first-messaging patterns and replies. Threequarters of all reciprocated messages fall within submarkets, and only one-quarter fall between individuals in different submarkets. A larger fraction, about 43 percent, of all first messages are between different submarkets, which indicates that people do attempt to contact partners outside of their submarkets, but those attempts are often unsuccessful. Overall, our results reveal the aggregate implications of individuals’ mate choices and suggest that metropolitan areas are best characterized as a collection of geographically integrated but demographically distinct submarkets. More generally, our study illustrates how state-of-the-art network science techniques can be applied to rich data from online interactions or administrative records to reveal subtle features of social structure. In recent years, the growing availability of search data from online sources has led to interest in how individuals’ choices reveal submarkets in other social domains (Piazzesi, Schneider, and Stroebel 2015; Rae 2015). As we have shown in the dating context, market outcomes reflect the choices made by actors on both sides (e.g., men and women in heterosexual dating markets, workers and firms in job markets). Our approach could straightforwardly be extended to look at structural features of housing or job markets, and we view this as a fruitful direction for future work.