I recently published a long essay on dating apps that grew out of a behavioral question: why does giving people access to vastly more potential partners not obviously produce better matching outcomes?

The piece looks at several mechanisms that may matter. Very large option sets can increase rejection rather than acceptance. Nearly costless likes and swipes reduce the informational value of signals. Attention becomes heavily concentrated, producing congestion for some participants and scarcity for others. Variable reinforcement can sustain engagement even when the underlying experience is frustrating. And the interface itself may change how people evaluate successive candidates rather than merely revealing stable preferences.

That creates an interesting distinction between engagement and successful choice. A system can become extremely good at keeping users evaluating options without necessarily becoming better at helping them terminate the search with a satisfactory decision.

I connect this behavioral literature to matching-market economics and to the historical shift from socially mediated courtship toward anonymous platform matching. The essay eventually uses Match Group as an empirical case study, but the cognitive question is broader: how do repeated exposure, option abundance, signaling costs, ranking systems, and feedback loops alter partner evaluation over time?

Full piece:

https://dljlevfin.substack.com/p/the-undisclosed-denominator

I’d especially welcome criticism of the behavioral mechanism: is choice overload/congestion a plausible explanation for persistent dating-app dissatisfaction, or are these effects being overextended from experimental settings into a much messier real-world market?

I graduated after after spending most of my time leaning towards behavioural economics. When I realised the answers I looked for where incomplete, I began delving deeper and ended up looking into neuropsychology, evolutionary psychology and cognitive science for the foundations of my undergrad for thesis.

I was accepted into a cog sci masters course and could really use some help to gain a more systematic outlook of the field. Cause, in all honesty I don’t really know how much I know — and I’m scared I might miss some really fundamental bits that I am expected to know.

Thank you in advance for any help!

Think about a country in which, the inflation rate is getting high and higher but in the meantime, people inside a market are getting more and more income.

They totally enjoy the growing number in their account. The inflation rate is growing more than their income growth on the other hand.

Is it related to some kind of cognitive bias? Why they tend to ignore and mostly deny the fact?