"People Are Experince Goods" Study

OPW -- Sep 14 -- Online dating frequently fails to meet user expectations because people, unlike many commodities available for purchase online, are 'experience goods:' Daters wish to screen potential partners by experiential attributes such as sense of humor or rapport, but online dating sites force them to screen by searchable attributes such as income or religion. Online daters spend 7x many hours screening profiles and e-mailing than in actual face-to-face interactions.They spend too much time conducting searches based on attributes they do not value highly, failing to connect with people for offline dates, and finding the few offline dates they do schedule to be unsatisfying.

"People Are Experience Goods" study found that virtual dates may decrease this trend. Virtual Dates, which simulate a first date, allow couples to interact in real time. Participants’ reactions were more positive toward individuals whom they had Virtual Date. Each year, more people are drawn to the virtual communities teeming with life online, and some even “emigrate” there: the current population of virtual worlds in games such as Second Life, World of Warcraft, and EverQuest is estimated at ~20M people, and 20% of these gamers claim the online realm as their “primary place of residence”. The average online role-playing game player spends 22 hours a week in his or her virtual world.

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Comments

[Fernando Ardenghi]

"Daters wish to screen potential partners by experiential attributes such as sense of humor or rapport, but online dating sites force them to screen by searchable attributes such as income or religion"

Mr. Brooks; that is only for Online Dating sites offering Browsing/Searching Options!!!

and not for Online Dating sites offering
Matching based on Self-Reported Data
and/or
Compatibility Matching Algorithms.

The study "People Are Experience Goods: Improve Online Dating With Virtual Dates" does not take into account a new discovery uncovered by Eastwick and Finkel 2008; also Kurzban and Weeden, 2007; Todd, Penke, Fasolo, and Lenton, 2007 who found that people often report partner preferences that are not compatible with their choices in real life.

Regards,

Fernando Ardenghi.
Buenos Aires.
Argentina.
[email protected]

[Dope]

How funny would be if people had to start giving themselves "rapport ratings" in their profiles lol.

[JB]

"Online daters spend 7x many hours screening profiles and e-mailing than in actual face-to-face interactions"

For men it's closer to 100x as many hours viewing /screening and dreaming,wishing,hoping,online than in actual face to face.

[David Evans]

This is part of the reason eHarmony is so good for some people. Send me a few people I should talk to and I'll talk to them, end of story.

Difficult to avoid the excruciating searching process, it takes too long and dating sites don't know how to effectively return results that matter. It remains mostly a guessing game.

I'd rather spend the time searching and emailing than in a virtual date though. At 20+ minutes a pop, at least, it's too tedious and time-consuming.

Speed dating is great, but the really good people don't tend to go on them due to the ongoing stigma. Where else can you meet 10-20 people in an evening?

[wow gold]

Interesting. I didn't know that 20M people spend most of their time on virtual world and more than half of that are into World of Warcraft. I think meeting up on virtual world is far better than online dating, for rapport can easily be built because of the same interest, right?

[Yogo Dating]

Obviously coming from a speed dating company I would stress David's nod towards speed dating, however it doesn't take an academic to work out the inefficiency of a market in which:

"Participants reported spending an average of 5.2 hours per week searching through profiles...and another 6.7 hours writing and responding to e-mails, all for a payoff of just 1.8 hours of offline interactions

But I would agree that the big challenge for speed dating is to ensure that the nights are of such a high standard that people aren't embarrassed to say that they've been speed dating.

Indeed at Yogo we feel that one of the biggest obstacles to the industry's expansion is that existing nights place too much emphasis on finding a partner and aren't designed to be fun above all.

We truly believe that if you concentrate on getting an interesting mix of the right single people to an event, then dates will follow.

Henry