Tinder’s pricing algorithm can charge users up to 5x more for same service (opens in new tab)

It's just that the product was somewhat complicated and the pricing form converted better when it generated leads for the sales team than when casual browsers bounced off it.

Specifically the social origin, genetic features, and property should cover this.

I feel very cynical about this. The best solution they can come up with is to let the GDPR deal with it? It's hard to believe that unchecking 5 boxes every time I visit a new site truly aligns with their goal of transparency. The researchers suspect that a lot of personalized pricing schemes are in violation of the GDPR, but I just don't know what enforcing compliance will change.

Coincidentally, I just started writing an essay in my ethics class on methods to deal with unethical algorithmic decision making. I'm very happy to discuss this.

[0] https://www.consumersinternational.org/media/369078/personal...

Why isn’t there a free platform for dating? (not counting the subreddits and FB groups for that, because they’re retooling something else, not built from the ground up to solve problems specific to this space).

It’s one of the biggest social issues imo, especially in cultures that restrict or repress dating in meatspace, or places with uneven demographics (e.g. there are literally millions of more men than women out there, which means that many will inevitably “die alone”)

If more people could find a suitable partner or even just compatible friends, it would make the world a much better place, if only by reducing misery (and spurring the economy :)

Why isn’t anyone else stepping in besides the wolves that just prey upon loneliness and desperation?

In short, males looking for females are very even in their rating of women along a bell curve. Females looking for males heavily skew towards the top 20% of males, while considering the bottom 80% "below average".

Tinder, and every other dating app, absolutely take advantage of this deep truth of human psychology and milk the bottom echelon of desperate men for every penny they can.

I am not a lawyer, but I do know age is a protected class in the US. It could be seen as age based discrimination. My understanding is that protected classes are the same criteria we use to, for example make it illegal to have a separate price for different races.

Edit: as the article mentions, they have already been hit with a lawsuit about this issue on these grounds before https://news.bloomberglaw.com/us-law-week/tinders-24-million...

Though sex is also a protected class and plenty of establishments have preferential rates for ladies nights, so I am not sure how black and white the law really is here; that particular issue has a pretty back-and-forth history as far as I can tell, and maybe this would similarly have some kind of carve out? Definitely seems like a very large legal risk. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ladies%27_night#:~:text=Ladi....

The predatory monetization scheme makes more sense in that context.

> We are committed to an internet that includes all the peoples of the earth — where a person’s demographic characteristics do not determine their online access, opportunities, or quality of experience.

You have to really question what kind of young woman is desperate enough to meet a man that she'd use an app, ... not the kind I'm interested in.

Marketing methods are often a little more fuzzy and less ethical than the actual underwriting. Insurers and marketers know about all sort of stuff that affects insurability, from eating habits, to gun ownership, to participation in high risk activity.

I don’t necessarily understand what Tinder does precisely, but it’s pretty obvious that you can exploit the insecurity or desperation of people looking for dates. It’s gonna be easier to extract cash from a 45 year old divorced woman than a 25 year old single woman. And you may want to use tolls as a friction point to reduce the number of undesirable or less profitable men.

You can probably use willingness to pay as a factor to score matches that will generate more churn that keeps the subscription in place. Generally speaking, I expect the most evil imaginable from companies like this. Online dating is a real mill, especially when you pass the threshold where you’re not attached and most people in your cohort are.

In the US, at least, you actually need to to get pre-approval for your prices and how you arrive at that price, and that information becomes public record.

E.g., I'm a redhead living in the Southern Hemisphere who has been active in the outdoors all my life and who smoked for 30 years.

So to get insurance that paid out in the event of terminal illness, I had to either pay a massive premium, or agree to exclude melanoma and lung cancer.

Makes sense - redheads produce minimal melanin, and there is far more UV exposure in the Southern Hemisphere due to the ozone "hole" that forms over Antarctica every year and drifts north onto southern South America / southern Africa / Australia / New Zealand. So as a ginger who had spent a lot of time outdoors under a harsher sun, I'm definitely in one of the rows in that actuarial table that's coloured red in Excel.

(And smoking is self-evident).

Now, back to Tinder. Are they charging based on risk? No.

They're charging what people will pay. And I'm willing to bet that they consider a recently divorced 48 year old man is able to pay more, and if I'm being uncharitable, desperate enough to do so.

So your comparison is very much apples and oranges.

It's well-known that insurance rates vary a lot from person to person (transparency) _and_ there's multiple insurance companies offering what's effectively the same service (competition). So, if I don't like the price, I can get my car/house/boat insured with someone else who will likely give me a different personalized price.

In this case Tinder seems to be working hard to keep the magnitude of the pricing variance secret and there's no real competition since Tinder's apps are the only way to access the service.

Personalized pricing for a digital service with a more-or-less constant cost-per-user doesn't make sense here (unless you want to maximize profits by unfairly discriminating against certain demographics).

1. Consumer surplus

2. https://www.economicshelp.org/blog/7042/economics/examples-o...

The most sense it makes for Tinder to do is to chage men more than women, which they already did.

Insurance cost is determined based on actuarial tables, whereas Tinder probably doesn't even consider the size of anyones table.

Or, they could use one of those automated finger-swiping things, like some guys tend to do.

You mean a company becoming more efficient at extracting money from their un-informed customers. A company finding new ways to leverage their market power, position, and information asymmetry.

If one thinks of commerce as "willing buyer,willing seller" then a transaction occurs at the point where both sides are content with the money/product swap. What other people paid for the same product is only tangentially relevant - if I'm happy with the transaction today why should I be less happy tomorrow based on someone else's transaction?

Outside the US you see this in places where markets are more fluid, and in some places have no pricing at all. You are expected to haggle (I mean, negotiate) - failure to do so makes a fool of the vendor to offer first too low a price.

In other words, the world is unfair. Sometimes in your favour, sometimes against. The sooner one accepts that the easier life becomes..

Equally though unfairness creates a gap in the market. Girls toys cost more than boys toys (same toy, different package) suggests an opportunity.

[1] for the purposes of this discussion I'm not talking about protected classes, such as race. There are some unfairness that are considered to be unacceptable.

It's unlikely age-based price discrimination will ever be made illegal, because it would effectively outlaw senior discounts.