Valentine's day

What do Valentine's day and National organ donor day have in common?  Well...hearts.  And love. And the same day...

February 14: National Donor Day

Focused on five points of life: organs, tissues, marrow, platelets, and blood. Many nonprofit health organizations sponsor blood and marrow drives and organ/tissue sign-ups across the nation. National Donor Day was started in 1998 by the Saturn Corporation and its United Auto Workers partner with the support of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and many nonprofit health organizations.

February 14 is National Donor Day

Each year, February 14th is significant for more than just Valentine's Day.  Today is designated as National Donor Day focusing on the "five points of life"  organ, tissue, marrow, platelets, and blood donation.  Donation drives are held throughout February nationwide.  Be a hero!  Be a donor!  And THANK YOU!

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Valentine's day celebration is also repugnant in some places:
Pakistan bans Valentine's Day for being unIslamic
Ban on the traditional Christian celebration of love follows a similar move by Saudi Arabia
"Pakistan has become the latest country to ban Valentine's Day.

It has prohibited all public celebrations and any media coverage because the celebration is not part of Muslim traditions."

And (I'm sorry to say) this: Mob Kills Eloped Lovers After Storming Afghan Police Station

Once-a-year dating match services for college students

Valentine's Day is a good day to take note of dating services that operate only once a year, particularly since one of them, Datamatch, operates on a Valentine's Day schedule.  It started at Harvard, and has now spread to other universities.  Here's a story from the Harvard Crimson:

Datamatch Sends Love to Thirteen Schools   By Michelle G. Kurilla
"Datamatch, a free matchmaking service run by the Harvard Computer Society, is now available to students at 13 schools.

Program organizers expanded Datamatch's reach from last year, when the service was available at four colleges and universities. HCS, which launched the program in 1994 exclusively for Harvard College students, also offered Datamatch to students at Brown University, Columbia University, and Wellesley College in 2018.
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"This Valentine’s Day, Datamatch will share the love on thirteen other campuses, in addition to Harvard: Boston College, Brown University, Carleton College, the University of Chicago, the Claremont Colleges, Columbia University, Cornell University, MIT, Wellesley College, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Washington University in St. Louis, and Yale University.
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"Matches will be released on February 14 across the country."
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And from The Oxford Student:
The Oxford Marriage Pact Is Back!  by Oz Myerson
"The Oxford Marriage Pact is back, fuelling discussion, debate, and hope among a large proportion of Oxford students this week. In the run up to Valentine’s day, it has been easy to spot many events geared towards hopeful lovers – The Oxford Marriage Pact sits comfortably amongst RAG Blind Dates, the Freud’s Jazz society Valentine’s evening, and the recent Magdalen x St. Hilda’s take-me- out event."
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Stanford's Marriage Pact doesn't run on Valentine's day, but is becoming a campus event. Here's a recent story from the Stanford Daily:
Stanford Marriage Pact releases second annual Campus Report  
by Danielle Echeverria

"The number of participants in the Marriage Pact — which asks students about a range of topics from religion and politics to sex and spontaneity — has grown each year since its advent three years ago. In total, 91.4% of the class of 2020 has sought a match at least once. The Marriage Pact has had 8,621 unique Stanford undergraduate participants across its three years of existence.

"Beyond the matching algorithm, the Marriage Pact has generated aggregated data on how Stanford students think and what they value. For the second year in a row, the Marriage Pact team has released a Campus Report that highlights trends in the data.
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"According to the Report, approximately two-thirds of students do not think it is important for their children to be raised with religion. Nearly half of students expect their children to attend Ivy League-tier schools and do not think it is important to make more money than their peers."

A Valentine's day salute to Gale and Shapley and the deferred acceptance algorithm

The University of California celebrates David Gale and Lloyd Shapley with an article appropriate to Valentine's Day:

How a matchmaking algorithm saved lives
Long before dating sites, a pair of economists delved into the question of matchmaking, and hit upon a formula with applications far beyond romance.

The article has Jane Austen characters in the explanation of the deferred acceptance algorithm, and pictures, including these:

They also link to this animated, interactive Berkeley mathsite exhibit on the stable marriage problem. (It is part of a larger MathSite interactive mathematics exhibit supported by the David Gale Fund for Interactive Mathematics.)
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Valentine's day reminds me of a post from a few years ago:

What has G-d been doing since the Creation? (Matchmaking, of course...))

Happy Valentine's day to all, from Philadelphia:)

Matching story for Valentine's day--BBC

Valentine's Day sparks a demand not just for love, but also for stories about marriage as a matching market.  This year I was among those interviewed by the BBC.  Below are two links:  you can listen to the interviews, or read a summary.

First, the interviews: They go for 18 minutes, and are easy listening.  I'm interviewed third, beginning just before minute 10 and going to about minute 14.   (I didn't see a way to embed it) :

Rational Partner Choice: "Should your head trump your heart when seeking lifelong love? We ask an economist, a romantic novelist and a hyper-rationalist businessman this Valentine's Day challenge."

(There actually are 4 interviews, the fourth is with the wife of the businessman, Ed Conard: they've been happily married for 20 years.)
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The written summary has me as the middle of three views on the subject (the headline below reflects the first of the views they considered, with marriage modeled as an optimal stopping problem).

Forget love: This is how to find your perfect partner  By Justin Rowlatt

Here's what they say about their conversation with me:

"Mr Conard's approach to choosing a wife is a well-established method for buying things like a new place to live but, says Nobel Prize winning economist Alvin Roth, spouses aren't like houses: marriage is a market without prices.
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"He agrees that it is important to meet quite a few possible partners before you take the plunge - "don't marry the first person you meet", he warns.

"You've also got to have realistic expectations: "the first thing a matrimonial agency has to do is persuade clients they aren't a 10."

"But, he says, you can do too much calibrating and evaluating. Choosing a partner is a two-way thing: it is only when you are serious about marriage that potential partners will take you seriously.

"Part of being well matched is the history you share and this starts when you first meet", Prof Roth says, "so investing in that history improves the quality of that match."
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And here are my Valentine's Day blog posts to date.

How can you tell you're an economist? Valentine's day economics

How can you tell you're an economist?  Maybe if Valentine's Day makes you think of dating sites as congested matching markets.  Here are two views from The Economist about thickness and congestion in dating markets:
Optimising romance: To find true love, it helps to understand the economic principles underpinning the search

Valentine’s day economics--Would a dating app just for economists work?

Matching and market design for Valentine's day

Valentine's day always inspires lots of stories about matching, and lately some of these are also about market design.  Here are some that caught my eye.

Ray Fisman, one of the pioneers in the experimental study of dating, writes in Slate about a market design experiment by my colleagues Soo Lee and Muriel Niederle: Will You Accept This Digital Rose? How little flower icons could solve Internet dating’s biggest problem. (see my blog post on that experiment here).

A more pessimistic view is expressed over at the Guardian: Is online dating destroying love? That article includes some discussion of Dan Ariely's efforts at designing a more interactive dating site.

The NY Times weighs in with a return to optimism (at least for educated women) in a story titled The M.R.S. and the Ph.D., which says that education is no longer the barrier to marriage that it once may have been for women.

And speaking of education, a NY Times profile of Harvard Ph.D. economists Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers points out that even if you let the tax consequences stop you from officially marrying, you can still arrange your joint lives in a way that looks very married indeed: It’s the Economy, Honey.

Happy Valentine's day to all, and happy hunting to all of you in matching mode.

Matchmaking on campus with Marriage Pact

 Happy Valentine's Day:)

Here's a story from the Amherst Student (the student newspaper), about an annual event on many campuses that started at Stanford.

True Love or True Disappointment? Students Reflect on the 2024 Marriage Pact by Savita Jani and Erin Sullivan

"With Valentine’s Day just around the corner, love is on the brain for many Amherst students. But Cupid isn’t just around on Feb. 14 — back in September, over 1,200 Mammoths sought romance through the Marriage Pact, an online questionnaire that matches students with their most statistically compatible partner on campus.

"At Amherst, the Association of Amherst Students (AAS) contracts with the Marriage Pact company, a sizable operation available at 100 schools across the country. Marriage Pact has served over 570,000 participants and made over 285,000 matches since its founding. It uses its own algorithm that takes psychology, “market design,” and linear algebra into account in order to find students their ideal match: a perfectly compatible other half whom they can one day marry (if they don’t find someone else).

"Marriage Pact also claims to address the nuances of romance by recognizing when similar values are necessary for a good match and when they aren’t. According to their website, 3-4% of Marriage Pact matches date for a year or longer. But how well has the Marriage Pact worked for Amherst students?

"To answer this question, we interviewed several Mammoths and collected responses from 54 respondents through an anonymous Google Form survey.

 

Here are my previous posts on the Marriage Pact.