Arming Women for the Dating Battlefield

Reddit’s Female Dating Strategy forum offers honesty and tough love in a treacherous online world

By Christine Rosen. She is a is senior writer at Commentary and a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of Virginia.

If dating is a market, maybe services like this make the market more efficient. So "buyers" and "sellers" might be more likely to get what they want.

But first, let's hear from a famous psychologist:



Now some excerpts from the article:

"Enter Reddit, the self-described “front page of the internet,” which hosts more than a million discussion forums, including one devoted to Female Dating Strategy (FDS). With some 50,000 members, FDS is billed as “the first and only all-women dating subreddit,” where participants anonymously “discuss effective dating strategies for women who want to take control of their dating lives.”"

"Newcomers are encouraged to read the extensive FDS Handbook, which includes principles such as “Be a High-Value Woman,” “Don’t Have Sex Before Commitment” and “We Have the Responsibility to Be Ruthless in Our Evaluation of Men.” Although the last principle sounds harsh, it’s actually practical advice in the age of dating apps. Today’s Tinderella must swipe through a lot of ugly profiles to find her prince. “We do ourselves and humanity no favors allowing men to exhibit subpar behavior and be rewarded with our attention. Thus, be ruthless in cutting off men who add no value to your life,” the FDS Handbook states."

"the site distinguishes between “low-value men” (LVM) and “high-value men” (HVM). LVMs do things like lie about wanting a serious relationship when they only want sex (“future-faking”), refuse to make an effort to plan proper dates or are simply not financially independent, responsible adults."

"There might be a lot of LVMs, according to Female Dating Strategy, but there are also far too many women willing to tolerate bad behavior from them."

"The strategies that FDSers endorse, particularly for online dating, are backed by scientific research. In a 2010 study in the journal Computer Science by the data scientist Andrew Fiore and colleagues, women were found to be more selective than men when it comes to assessing potential suitors and more distrustful of men who didn’t respect the preferences that women stated for a match. But choosing wisely based on what someone’s profile says about them isn’t easy. Everyone lies: The Cornell University communications researchers Catalina Toma and Jeffrey Hancock found that men tend to lie about their height and women about their weight. Everyone is offering only selective disclosures about themselves.

That turns out to be a rational strategy. A 2007 study by Michael Norton, Jeana Frost and Dan Ariely in the Journal of Personal and Social Psychology found that when it comes to online dating, “although people believe that learning more about others leads to greater liking, more information about others leads, on average, to less liking.” In other words, the more ambiguous a person’s profile is, the more likely it is that interested potential matches will have to fill in the blanks with their best guesses."

Related posts:

Is It Okay To Use An App To Bribe Someone Into Going On A Date?

Who wrote your potential love's online dating profile? (maybe they outsourced it to a professional who specializes in that) 

When Women Earn More Than Men, Is Dating Affected?

Who Pays on the First Date? No One Knows Anymore, and It’s Really Awkward

Can Giving Up Money And Material Things Lead To More Love?

Can You Put A Price Tag On Love?

Do Opposites Attract? Not Usually, Except Maybe When It Comes To Money

eHarmony To Provide Personal Counselors To Help You Find Mr. Or Ms. Right

Do Women Really Value Income over Looks in a Mate? by Marina Adshade

No, Brexit Won’t Free the U.K. From EU Regulations

British industries from aerospace to telecommunications still need to follow Brussels’s rules to retain access to vital European markets

By Anu Bradford. She is a professor at Columbia Law School and the author of “The Brussels Effect: How the European Union Rules the World.” One economic concept it mentions is "economies of scale." Excerpts:

"EU consumers currently buy almost half of what the U.K. exports, and the EU is a top export destination for many British industries—including aerospace, automobiles, chemicals, financial services, food manufacturing, pharmaceuticals and telecommunications. So all of these industries will need to remain closely aligned with EU regulations to preserve their access to the European market"

"The EU doesn’t even need the British government to commit to a regulatory alignment as part of any future trade deal between Brussels and London. All the EU needs is to demand that companies doing business in the union abide by its rules. Global companies often voluntarily standardize their operations around the most stringent regulatory standard out there—frequently the EU standard—since complying with that standard will typically ensure access to all markets. Economies of scale and other benefits of uniform production make it unlikely that these firms would set up two production lines, one for the EU and another for the rest of the world.

Even multinationals and U.S. companies that benefit from a much larger and less regulated home market often adjust their global business practices to EU rules. Facebook, Google and Microsoft have global privacy policies written with Brussels in mind. Twitter and YouTube have echoed the EU’s definition of hate speech globally, pledging to delete material on their platforms that the EU would deem unacceptable even when such speech might be protected by the U.S. First Amendment."

"CHS Inc., the giant U.S. farm cooperative, has refused to sell seeds or buy grain from U.S. farmers if they contain traits of genetically modified organisms banned in the EU."

"Mr. Johnson’s government will also wind up continuing to emulate many of the EU rules it most despised, including those on data privacy. Pro-Brexit voices have long criticized the EU’s data-protection rules for impeding innovation and undermining British firms’ competitiveness. But the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation will set the terms moving forward, or data flows between the U.K. and the EU will halt."

"Ironically, Brexit will probably strengthen many EU regulations, leaving U.K. companies to face an even more heavily regulated marketplace in the coming years. London will no longer have a say over EU regulations, removing an important pro-market voice from the table where those regulations are written."

Economies of Scale (Increasing Returns to Scale) = A situation in which long-run average total cost declines as the firm increases its level of output. The percentage increase in Q is greater than the percentage increase in TC.

You could be paying higher insurance premiums than someone with the same driving history, car and background because of price optimization

See Your habits may be costing you by Kayda Norman of Nerdwallet.

The price optimization the article mentions sounds like what economists call "price discrimination." That is explained below. In the article, it sounds like the unwillingness to shop around means that your demand is less elastic and those customers get charged a higher price.

Excerpts from the article: 

"some insurers jack up prices based on seemingly unrelated data — like your magazine subscriptions or what groceries you buy.

Even if you have a clean driving record and have stayed loyal to your insurance company for the past 10 years, you could be paying higher premiums than someone with the same driving history, car and background. Why? Price optimization.

Price optimization is the practice of charging higher rates based on the likelihood that a person will not shop around for a lower price. Insurers create algorithms based on all kinds of personal data, including loyalty to other service providers and shopping behavior, but not your driving habits. This is a separate formula from other common auto insurance rate factors like age, neighborhood, gender and the type of car you drive.

Factors can run the gamut from your magazine subscriptions, the number of phones you buy and your web browsing history. This means a company's most loyal customers may be most affected by this practice."

"Price optimization is illegal in 20 states"

"Because companies use different algorithms to determine rates, price optimization can affect anyone who doesn't compare insurance rates often."

"The reason they can charge you $1,000 and another person $2,000 is because the person paying $2,000 doesn't know about the $1,000 company out there"

Charging different prices to different groups of customers based on their ability and willingness to pay (a discount) is price discrimination.

Why price discrimination raises profits

1. If a firm can get a higher price from some customers than others they increase their profits.
2. If a firm can lower the price for others who might not have bought the product to begin with, they also increase their profits.

Necessary Conditions for Price Discrimination

1. The firm must face a downward sloping demand. Monopolies do but firms in perfect competition do not (their demand, also their MR line, is flat).

2. The firm must be able to readily (and cheaply) identify buyers or groups of buyers with predictably different elasticities of demand (senior citizens have a more elastic demand and will shop around more since they have more time so restaurants might give them a discount). The more elastic the demand, the greater the change in quantity demanded for a given change in price.

3. The firm must be able to prevent resale of the product or service. If a student can buy a movie ticket for $6 while everyone else pays $8, the firm will lose money if the students turn around and sell their tickets for $7. So the theater can prevent resale by checking student IDs to make sure people holding the lower price ticket really are students.

#2 might be the key here for Amazon. The lower income customers will be spending a bigger share of their budgets on Amazon products and services. One of the determinants of elasticity is how much of your budget you spend on the item. As this goes up, your demand becomes more elastic (that is, quantity will change more for a given change in price). You are affected alot more by a change in the price of cars than a change in the price of donuts. So if the price of cars doubles, the quantity demanded will fall much more than if the price of donuts doubles.

And when firms can price discriminate, as explained above, they will charge lower prices (offer discounts) to those groups with higher elasticities. The number of substitute goods and the amount of time consumes have to adjust to price changes also affect elasticity.

NCAA Takes Another Court Hit on Athlete Compensation: The Ninth Circuit ruled that the organization’s restrictions violated federal antitrust law

By Brent Kendall, Louise Radnofsky and Laine Higgins of The WSJ.

One of the chapters that students like to read from the book The Economics of Public Issues is the one about the NCAA being a cartel. All the schools agree not to pay the athletes. Those athletes generate alot of revenue for the schools but get paid very little. For the best players, the difference can be a a million dollars.

Excerpts from the article:

"A federal appeals court dealt another blow to the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s efforts to keep tight limits on compensating student-athletes, ruling that the organization’s restrictions violated federal antitrust law.

“NCAA limits on education-related benefits do not play by the Sherman Act’s rules,” the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said in a ruling Monday.

The decision, by a unanimous three-judge panel, said the NCAA unlawfully limited competition for student athletes by adopting a cramped view of the kinds of compensation the athletes could receive related to their education.

"The decision marks the latest instance in which judges have rejected the NCAA’s antitrust defenses of its old ways of doing business. At the same time, the courts have declined to give the athletes unrestricted remuneration.

Courts previously struck a blow against NCAA amateurism rules in a case brought by former UCLA basketball player Ed O’Bannon over the use of his likeness in a videogame, a case that made it easier for athletes to be compensated for the full cost of attending school.

The current case was filed by former West Virginia University running back Shawne Alston and other former Division I athletes who argued that the NCAA’s rules violated U.S. antitrust law by artificially depressing their compensation. The athletes won a decision from U.S. District Judge Claudia Wilken in 2019 that the NCAA could no longer limit compensation and benefits as tightly.

The appeals court’s ruling, written by Chief Judge Sidney Thomas, affirmed Judge Wilken’s decision and allows college athletes to receive compensation for the cost of educational materials, such as laptop computers or musical instruments, or be guaranteed access to paid-for graduate or vocational school."

"The Ninth Circuit, however, didn’t go as far as the athletes wanted, declining to dismantle NCAA restrictions on compensation that aren’t connected to education-related benefits.

One member of the panel, Judge Milan Smith, said the courts should do more to protect college athletes from an NCAA that he described as a “cartel” that makes billions of dollars from their labor.

The NCAA was eyeing an onslaught of legislation from states, led by California, when it announced a once unthinkable reversal of position last fall and said it would move to allow college players to make some money from name, image and likeness rights."

Related posts:

Cost of attendance stipends in college sports 

How The Economics Of College Sports Might Be Distorted

Comparative Advantage

When I covered this recently in one of my classes, a student told me that when he took a high school economics class that the teacher said that there were cases where one country would not benefit from trading with another in a two good example.

This is just flat wrong, as I explain in the example below. If it takes country A less time to make both goods than country B, country A can still benefit by trading with country B.

From the OECD:

"The mathematician Stanislaw Ulam did not have a high opinion of the social sciences. He once challenged Paul Samuelson, Nobel laureate in economics, to name one social science proposition that was both true and non-trivial. Samuelson nominated comparative advantage: “That this idea is logically true need not be argued before a mathematician; that it is not trivial is attested by the thousands of important and intelligent men who have never been able to grasp the doctrine for themselves or to believe it after it was explained to them.”"

See Comparative advantage: Doing what you do best.

So here is a post from 2018.

Yesterday I posted a link to the new PBS series "First Civilizations" which had an interesting episode on trade. Last year was the 200th anniversary of David Ricardo's important idea called "comparative advantage." It explains how two nations can benefit from trade even if one country seems to be better at making all products than the other.

The Washington Post even had an article about it last year. It's the 200th anniversary of the most counterintuitive idea in the social sciences by Daniel W. Drezner, a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University.

Trade can benefit both sides. Otherwise, why make the trade? For example, if you have bread and no water and I have water and no bread, if I trade some water to you for some of your bread, we both gain or are better off.

It might seem like if one country is "better" at producing all goods than another, they have no room for trade. But even then, the seemingly more advanced country will still gain from trade.

Here is an example that comes from  David Ricardo himself. Comparative advantage is when you can produce a good at a lower opportunity cost than others face (in a two good example, it is impossible to have the comparative advantage in both goods).

Suppose it takes 40 labor hours to make a barrel of wine in England and 2 hours to make a yard of cloth. In Portugal, those numbers are 10 and 1, respectively. So it looks like Portugal is "better" at producing both goods since it takes them less time to make wine and less time to make cloth.

The labor hours numbers means that if England wants a barrel of wine, it would have to give up 20 yards of cloth (since 40/2 = 20-if you don't produce a barrel of wine, you save 40 hours of labor and you can make 20 yards of cloth in that time).

In Portugal, if you want to trade a barrel of wine, you can get 10 yards of cloth. Not spending 10 hours making wine allows them to make 10 yards of cloth.

So Portugal has the comparative advantage in wine since less cloth is given up there (10 yards) than in England (20 yards) for every one barrel of wine produced. That is a lower opportunity cost.

England would only give 1/20 a barrel of wine to make cloth while Portugal gives up 1/10 a barrel. England has the  comparative advantage in cloth.

How can the two countries gain from trade? What if England trades 15 yards of cloth to Portugal for 1 barrel of wine?

Both countries gain. England is better off since they only give up 15 yards of cloth to get that barrel of wine when normally they have to give up 20.

Portugal gets more cloth (15 yards instead of 10) for that 1 barrel of wine they trade. They are better off, too (even though it takes them less time to make each product than in England). 

Remdesivir and Type I & Type II errors

I use the book The Economics of Public Issues in my micro classes. Chapter 1 is called "Death by Bureaucrat." It discusses how the Food and Drug Administration can make either a Type I error or a Type II error.

Type I error: The FDA approves a drug before enough testing is done and when people take it, there are harmful side effects.

Type II error: The FDA tests a drug longer than necessary to stay on the safe side. But people might suffer because the drug is not yet available. 80,000 people died waiting for Septra to be approved.

The FDA would rather make a Type II error because the public can blame the FDA if a Type I error occurs.

Remdesivir might be a treatment for Covid-19. But if it, or any other drug, shows some promise, how long do we keep testing it before we allow patients to take it? Could people who would otherwise be saved die while testing is going on?

See Inside the NIH’s controversial decision to stop its big remdesivir study by Matthew Herper of STAT. Excerpt:

"The drug maker Gilead Sciences released a bombshell two weeks ago: A study conducted by a U.S. government agency had found that the company’s experimental drug, remdesivir, was the first treatment shown to have even a small effect against Covid-19.

Behind that ray of hope, though, was one of the toughest quandaries in medicine: how to balance the need to rigorously test a new medicine for safety and effectiveness with the moral imperative to get patients a treatment that works as quickly as possible. At the heart of the decision about when to end the trial was a process that was — as is often in the case in clinical trials — by turns secretive and bureaucratic.

The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases has described to STAT in new detail how it made its fateful decision: to start giving remdesivir to patients who had been assigned to receive a placebo in the study, essentially limiting researchers’ ability to collect more data about whether the drug saves lives — something the study, called ACTT-1, suggests but does not prove. In the trial, 8% of the participants given remdesivir died, compared with 11.6% of the placebo group, a difference that was not statistically significant. 

A top NIAID official said he had no regrets about the decision. 

“There certainly was unanimity within the institute that this was the right thing to do,” said H. Clifford Lane, NIAID’s clinical director. “While I think there might’ve been some discussion, [because] everyone always tries to play devil’s advocate in these discussions, I think there was a pretty uniform opinion that this was what we should do.”

From the standpoint of the agency, he said, the study had answered the question it was designed to answer: The median time that hospitalized Covid-19 patients on remdesivir took to stop needing oxygen or exit the hospital was, at 11 days, four days shorter than those who were on placebo. “How many patients would we want to put at risk of dying,” he asked, for that last little bit of proof? Remdesivir, he noted, was not a home run, but is probably better than nothing.

Steven Nissen, a veteran trialist and cardiologist at the Cleveland Clinic, disagreed that giving placebo patients remdesivir was the right call. “I believe it is in society’s best interest to determine whether remdesivir can reduce mortality, and with the release of this information doing a placebo-controlled trial to determine if there is a mortality benefit will be very difficult,” he said. “The question is: Was there a route, or is there a route, to determine if the drug can prevent death?” The decision is “a lost opportunity,” he said.

Peter Bach, the director of the Center for Health Policy and Outcomes at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, agreed with Nissen. “The core understanding of clinical research participation and clinical research conduct is we run the trial rigorously to provide the most accurate information about the right treatment,” he said. And that answer, he argued, should ideally have determined whether remdesivir saves lives.

The reason we have shut our whole society down, Bach said, is not to prevent Covid-19 patients from spending a few more days in the hospital. It is to prevent patients from dying. “Mortality is the right endpoint,” he said.

Most experts contacted by STAT expressed opinions that fell between Nissen and Lane, believing that the decision was a difficult case, with several defending the NIAID."