Unlike dating apps, pizza restaurants can make more money by making better pizza than a neighbouring place (provided that the marginal extra customer generates more profit than the marginal extra cost). The difference is that no dating app is going to get repeat business from a succesful match so there is no incentive for them to actualy be better than the opposition (although there is incentive to appear to better).
As a practical point, the ideal for a dating cartel would be for all dating apps to form a non-transitive preference loop, based on superficial criteria, forever shuttling their customers round and round.
Sure every product and service tries to raise its price and cut its costs, but is held in check by competition / consumer willingness to pay, and so life goes on.
Still, there are a few stylized facts about dating apps that make them uniquely susceptible to misalignment of incentives, relative to consumer goods like pizzas.
- You're not paying for the thing you actually want, which is a spouse. You're paying for access to a network where you *might* find a spouse, in which your LTV is inversely proportional to how quickly that happens. Yes, if that expected time became infinite then the value of the network would fall to zero and the app would fail, just like a hamburger joint that sold cardboard buns would fail. But as long as you're not paying for exactly what you want, you should expect incentive shear in exactly the direction we observe: On the margin, you're kept on the platform longer than really necessary to match you up, and your LTV goes up. You eat this cost because you can't directly measure the quality of the matches in the first place, and meeting your spouse a few months late is better than never.
- Why can't you align incentives by paying for exactly what you want (i.e. getting match-made with your future spouse)? Well, you don't know that when you meet them! The ideal incentive structure is a contract that promises a large lump sum to the matchmaking service on your wedding day, conditional on meeting your spouse through the service. A few matchmaking services offer this, but they're low-volume and high-touch because the fraction of men who can hold five figures in escrow is much smaller than the fraction who can pay ten bucks a month. There's a lot more legal / financial risk and way higher lag times in that business model than in accepting consumer-scale Stripe payments.
- There's living memory of dating apps that were originally *too good* at matching users, and later got enshittified in order to increase LTV. OKCupid in particular used to have a "ctrl+F over all profiles" feature which was by far the most interesting feature of the site, and allowed you to find anyone in the world who put a certain string in their profile. Oddly enough, that feature was one of the first to go after OKC's acquisition by Match Group. Now OKC is a random reward swipefest, just like everyone else.
- That said, Match Group doesn't (yet) have a literal monopoly over human courtship and people can and do propose alternatives, including irl speed-dating events and so on. People should do more of that! I think it's just hard to compete with a consortium that has essentially infinite distribution and an army of data scientists who are paid well to figure out *exactly* how long you're willing to stay on platform before bailing.
There's a special factor here that doesn't apply to all products and makes the information asymmetry worse. Dating apps belong to a limited class of products that are intended to work over time, and once they have worked, the user will not need them anymore. Only a few products (e.g., some medicines) are like this. These products have a special incentive not to work (lengthen the period of use), and a special information asymmetry- namely, it's hard for the user to see if the product has started 'working' for them- while the provider can see the long-term trajectory over many customers. While this largely isn't an issue with medicines because doctors etc., monitor it, it very much is with dating apps.
I don't know if this is an info asymmetry, but: the apps are suppliers of dates, not suppliers of the outcome of dates (longterm relationship or sexual fling). For supplying dates, they're way more efficient than irl methods.
Perhaps people don't know that there's no general solution to the gnarly problem of outcomes, which presumably requires advanced knowledge of one's own & others' psychology, etc. I suspect that irl methods (matchmakers, folk wisdom, church socials, arranged marriages, singles bars) also don't have a good solution to the outcome of dates — but maybe *this* isn't common knowledge among users. So the apps are guaranteed to continue to thrive because they do the supply part way better. But consumers remain disgruntled because they don't realise the outcome part is not what the product is?
Under the "people are cheap" hypothesis, dating apps outsource a decent-sized chunk of the process to users. Setting up an attractive profile is a skill most people don't innately possess, and chatting with strangers over text is a skill most people haven't really refined. It could be that people are complaining about the extra stuff they have to do, before dating even becomes an option. Especially if a failure to master those initial steps reliably leads to rejection.
Surprised that this has not come up, but I think there's a fundamental difference between paying for a deliverable (a car, a pizza, a haircut) and paying for time, as you do with lawyers or consultants, which I think are a better comparison and have the same incentives to draw out the process. Add to that the relatively low price, the fact that most people don't need a new partner every other week, and a healthy dose of moral hazard, and I think you get the perfect storm with dating apps smack in the middle of it.
Very much this. The fundamental incentive mismatch is the same as with hourly billed services, which will create a different equilibrium than the other examples that dynomight compares to.
But also, with dating, the amount of chance and uncertainty is huge. It's not just information asymmetry; it's incredibly difficult even for the service provider to know how close it got to an optimal outcome. In that sense it's kind of like treating uncommon diseases, where we rely on the institutional culture of medicine rather than trying to judge on outcomes.
As you alluded, equilibrium is necessary, and with all things in economics, the market dictates what's possible. Some markets are more lenient than others. Some are less transparent, etc, etc.
One better metaphor than the pizza joint is the job board.
Job board companies should be as reviled as dating apps. They have the same adverse incentive problem: There's little reason to visit glassdoor once you're successfully "matched." It's weird to apply for a job on Glassdoor and then immediately get flushed with competing openings... yet not quite as distasteful as Tinder inviting you to revisit the app to see your new leads the second after you've asked one out for a date.
There's similar complexity issues: Parties are trying to arrange a multi-year relationship, pressure is high.
+1 to Adam Mastroianni's comment below that people might conflate hating dating apps with hating the dating process. Maybe people don't hate Glassdoor as noisily because their hate is pointed at "the interview process" or "the job market" or "the economy."
I suspect recruiters have similar dispassion for glassdoor candidates as daters have for tinder candidates: you're awash with a mountain of fairly comparable profiles often full of embellished details. At least as a recruiter you're paid with benefits for the 40 hr/wk of labor. No such luck for the match group user.
Jobs-to-be-done theory explains why the coach airplane experience is substandard.
Theory author posits "you don't want a quarter-inch drill, you want a quarter-inch hole." In the airplane's case: you don't *really* want to be suspended midair for several hours, you want a week in Cancun. The airline that has the most tolerable "cancun" inventory will be the most successful.
Meanwhile: Delta offers Comfort, Comfort Plus, and now Comfort Basic (https://news.delta.com/introducing-delta-comfort-basic-deltas-latest-travel-experience-unpacked) which appear to meet your legroom specs. Far pricier than your model. It's likely some people love these since Delta keeps adding new derivatives. But also: Delta's proven that the greater legroom experience is possible, and yet, the majority of the cabin is still basic coach.
However, there are a couple of answers that I think apply to social apps specifically (and not to, say, selling used cars):
***EDIT: Just realised that basically all the other comments say the same stuff that I've said below (and probably say it better). Nothing new to see here, please go about your business....***
Firstly, for social apps specifically, once a company has captured enough of the market, its network effects make up for *a lot* of bad behaviour. It's not much good your being on a super-ethical dating app if you're the only person within a 500 mile radius who is. So, companies oriented around network effects are super nice to their users at first, then "flip" once they've captured enough market share. Google's reneging on their "don't be evil" philosophy. Uber/airBnB's having used to cost less than taxis/hotels and offer more better protection, but now cost more and offer worse user protection.
Secondly, I think there's an information asymmetry (as described in Freakonomics) It's very difficult for the average user to tell a dating app that's trying to get you paired-off from a dating-app that's trying to string you along. So, the apps compete on superficial features, UX, etc., but not on the fundamental things that actually make the product worthwhile. Just as the used-car market is famously terrible because you can see whether or not a car has a fancy sound system or whatever but you can't see how much wear the drivetrain components have.
The "pair you off" dating app and the "string you along" dating app will both show you people of whatever sex you fancy, both will allow you to message people and ask them on dates, both will offer extra, er, stuff (not sure about this!) for higher payment tiers, etc. - but the *algorithm that chooses who gets to see whom* is entirely inscrutable. The only way to know whether you're being matched with people whom the algorithm thinks are genuinely likely to be interested in you is to use the app for several years. If you've fallen into the unfortunate habit of using dating apps for validation/attention rather than to try to get paired-off and leave the app, the algorithm might detect this and send you people who offer validation/attention rather than people who you might actually want to pair-off with - again, you have no way to know except to use the app for years upon years and try to detect the patterns yourself.
Is there a market for an app with an open-source algorithm? I would hope so, but I fear probably not:
1) I don't think most people are capable of understanding such an algorithm; they'd rely on other people to explain it to them. And nobody wants to get dating advice from the sorts of people who pore over open-source algorithms. The company could pay influencers or celebrities or whoever to explain how their algorithm works and say how wonderful it is - but so could your rival closed-source, string-you-along dating app. Companies can pay influencers and celebrities to say basically anything regardless of its truthfulness.
[Except for Nicki Minaj, obviously. She's an incorruptible, neon-Hayabusa-borne beacon of truth and righteousness.]
2) The choices we all actually make when choosing whom to date probably aren't exactly flattering to us. I suspect most people really, *really* don't want to see how the sausage is made.
> “The thing about video streaming is that high-resolution video uses more expensive bandwidth. So they have an incentive to use low-resolution.”
(Wildly off-topic and utterly missing the point but I think it's interesting so I'm going to talk about it anyway, sorry...) Video streaming services have an incentive to use the lowest _bitrate_ possible, not specifically the lowest resolution possible. If users think resolution alone determines the quality of a stream, they'll tolerate ultra-compressed 4K video but won't watch high-quality encodings at 1080p, streaming services would offer streams with really high resolutions but super-lossy video compression to keep the bitrate as low as possible.
(And this is essentially what we see. 4K blu-ray bitrate: 128Mbps. Netflix' 4K bitrate: roughly 20Mbps. If one wants high resolution video that's also high quality I'm afraid one needs to either buy physical media or else set sail upon the high seas.)
If users are unable to tell whether they are dealing with a fake account (organised by the app provider) this seems a mixture of information asymmetry - and something you didn't mention: lack of regulation. Drugs are another example for the need of regulation due to stark incentive asymmetries.
A dating app isn't selling a product. It's a service facilitating matching, like eBay or Uber Eats. It has network effects. Unlike car companies or pizza places, a new entrant can't enter with fresh inventory. Can't exactly grow bfs or gfs in a factory. If you try and grow some, the lead times are killer, nor do you have legal ownership in the first place.
Another thing that distinguishes pizza and dating is that there is no review mechanism. Most pizza are roughly the same but we care a great deal about differences in people. I can review a pizza place based on a pizza. There are no BF/GF reviews. This ties in to how Hinge differs from Uber Eats and eBay. The purchase frequency/volume from each seller is very low which limits how much reviews are worth, if they existed in the first place. This limits the spread of market information.
Adding reviews has legal and social costs. People don't want that, companies don't want that. People aren't convinced nor willing to pay matching services costing thousands of $$$.
Re airlines: I would absolutely pay 3% more for an extra 2.5cm of leg room so that my world doesn't end if the person in front of me leans their seat back all the way. That's like $6 on a standard flight! I wonder if many people feel similarly. (One intuition pump: "comfort economy" sections tend to give something like 7-9cm of additional leg room but often cost ~$80 domestic or double that international, implying that at least enough people to fill the comfort seats value the marginal cm of leg room at like $10, whereas your example is closer to $2/cm.)
But suppose NiceAirline does this on half their planes. Now I'm looking for a flight, so I search on Google Flights or my preferred platform of choice, and I see a bunch of prices for different airlines and flights I might take. Even if I'm perfectly happy to pay the $6 for extra comfort, I have to know that NiceAirline does this on some planes, look up the plane on the route, look up whether this plane is one of the luxury planes, etc. That's hard and I'm lazy, so I just pick the cheapest flight.
It's not an information asymmetry, exactly: all the information is available to me, if not directly in my head. And it's not pricing power, but rather the opposite: the airline has to compete so heavily on price that it's hard to compete on quality, because price is hyper legibile.
So maybe some other reasons why stuff is crap could include search frictions or forced competition on dimensions other than crappiness.
Yeah, I was also surprised by that calculation! Airlines must *love* selling those "comfort economy" upgrades. Though I guess a lot of those seats end up going to people in loyalty programs, who are just the kind of high-information folks that would be most likely to go through the whole dance that you described...
I want to make a comment regarding your point about clothes (fast fashion / Primark clothes that fall apart immediately). I'm not sure if this is an argument that generalizes or if I'm making a very specific remark, but:
I don't really accept the premise that enough people are not willing to pay more for better clothes, or that there isn't a market for this. The inside view for me, who is willing to do that, is rather that it's incredibly _hard_ to find! Like, how do you trust that the clothes you're paying extra for, actually is of better quality? You might think word of mouth, or "reputation", but my theory is this: any producer who tries to position themselves as a "better quality at a slightly higher price" kind of player, as soon as they succeed in generating that impression in the market, immediately faces an immense pressure. An incentive gradient that's deathly steep. A temptation beyond resistance. What if they now were to slowly decrease the quality of their products, and reap the profits? Not doing so, is an almost insane business decision. And a good reputation lingers, it takes time for people's opinion to update. Therefore, I claim, basically every brand that starts out with the best of intentions, ends up shittifying their own products and cannibalizing their own brand and good reputation, for short (or medium) term gains.
This is a continuous slide into shittification of essentially every brand that was once good, and by the time you or I, the average consumer, who kinda cares about this stuff and are willing to pay the higher price but don't follow the details of the fashion world, receive word of this "great" product or brand, it has already started or even fully slid into complete garbage. Thus it's very hard or almost impossible to find trustworthy producers.
This is some kind of market failure, although I'm not sure how to best describe it (information asymmetry? lack of trust?), and I don't think it's due to a lack of willing customers.
I think this is largely true, but FWIW inspecting clothing for quality is really easy on the margins. I think the issue is that the modal consumer will not do this even if you instruct them on how to do so, and botiques selling higher-end clothing have no customers (because the mediam consumer buys cheap junk and the fashion fan buys expensive junk)
I think this is evidence for shortsighted consumer preferences (or you can call it a Revealed Preference for junk so long as it's cheaper)
Unlike dating apps, pizza restaurants can make more money by making better pizza than a neighbouring place (provided that the marginal extra customer generates more profit than the marginal extra cost). The difference is that no dating app is going to get repeat business from a succesful match so there is no incentive for them to actualy be better than the opposition (although there is incentive to appear to better).
As a practical point, the ideal for a dating cartel would be for all dating apps to form a non-transitive preference loop, based on superficial criteria, forever shuttling their customers round and round.
Sure every product and service tries to raise its price and cut its costs, but is held in check by competition / consumer willingness to pay, and so life goes on.
Still, there are a few stylized facts about dating apps that make them uniquely susceptible to misalignment of incentives, relative to consumer goods like pizzas.
- You're not paying for the thing you actually want, which is a spouse. You're paying for access to a network where you *might* find a spouse, in which your LTV is inversely proportional to how quickly that happens. Yes, if that expected time became infinite then the value of the network would fall to zero and the app would fail, just like a hamburger joint that sold cardboard buns would fail. But as long as you're not paying for exactly what you want, you should expect incentive shear in exactly the direction we observe: On the margin, you're kept on the platform longer than really necessary to match you up, and your LTV goes up. You eat this cost because you can't directly measure the quality of the matches in the first place, and meeting your spouse a few months late is better than never.
- Why can't you align incentives by paying for exactly what you want (i.e. getting match-made with your future spouse)? Well, you don't know that when you meet them! The ideal incentive structure is a contract that promises a large lump sum to the matchmaking service on your wedding day, conditional on meeting your spouse through the service. A few matchmaking services offer this, but they're low-volume and high-touch because the fraction of men who can hold five figures in escrow is much smaller than the fraction who can pay ten bucks a month. There's a lot more legal / financial risk and way higher lag times in that business model than in accepting consumer-scale Stripe payments.
- There's living memory of dating apps that were originally *too good* at matching users, and later got enshittified in order to increase LTV. OKCupid in particular used to have a "ctrl+F over all profiles" feature which was by far the most interesting feature of the site, and allowed you to find anyone in the world who put a certain string in their profile. Oddly enough, that feature was one of the first to go after OKC's acquisition by Match Group. Now OKC is a random reward swipefest, just like everyone else.
- That said, Match Group doesn't (yet) have a literal monopoly over human courtship and people can and do propose alternatives, including irl speed-dating events and so on. People should do more of that! I think it's just hard to compete with a consortium that has essentially infinite distribution and an army of data scientists who are paid well to figure out *exactly* how long you're willing to stay on platform before bailing.
> why IKEA furniture <..> fall apart so quickly
Does it?
There's a special factor here that doesn't apply to all products and makes the information asymmetry worse. Dating apps belong to a limited class of products that are intended to work over time, and once they have worked, the user will not need them anymore. Only a few products (e.g., some medicines) are like this. These products have a special incentive not to work (lengthen the period of use), and a special information asymmetry- namely, it's hard for the user to see if the product has started 'working' for them- while the provider can see the long-term trajectory over many customers. While this largely isn't an issue with medicines because doctors etc., monitor it, it very much is with dating apps.
I don't know if this is an info asymmetry, but: the apps are suppliers of dates, not suppliers of the outcome of dates (longterm relationship or sexual fling). For supplying dates, they're way more efficient than irl methods.
Perhaps people don't know that there's no general solution to the gnarly problem of outcomes, which presumably requires advanced knowledge of one's own & others' psychology, etc. I suspect that irl methods (matchmakers, folk wisdom, church socials, arranged marriages, singles bars) also don't have a good solution to the outcome of dates — but maybe *this* isn't common knowledge among users. So the apps are guaranteed to continue to thrive because they do the supply part way better. But consumers remain disgruntled because they don't realise the outcome part is not what the product is?
What if there is nothing specific about dating apps and dating just sucks in general
Under the "people are cheap" hypothesis, dating apps outsource a decent-sized chunk of the process to users. Setting up an attractive profile is a skill most people don't innately possess, and chatting with strangers over text is a skill most people haven't really refined. It could be that people are complaining about the extra stuff they have to do, before dating even becomes an option. Especially if a failure to master those initial steps reliably leads to rejection.
Surprised that this has not come up, but I think there's a fundamental difference between paying for a deliverable (a car, a pizza, a haircut) and paying for time, as you do with lawyers or consultants, which I think are a better comparison and have the same incentives to draw out the process. Add to that the relatively low price, the fact that most people don't need a new partner every other week, and a healthy dose of moral hazard, and I think you get the perfect storm with dating apps smack in the middle of it.
Very much this. The fundamental incentive mismatch is the same as with hourly billed services, which will create a different equilibrium than the other examples that dynomight compares to.
But also, with dating, the amount of chance and uncertainty is huge. It's not just information asymmetry; it's incredibly difficult even for the service provider to know how close it got to an optimal outcome. In that sense it's kind of like treating uncommon diseases, where we rely on the institutional culture of medicine rather than trying to judge on outcomes.
I think people have already touched enough on the Network Effect and Enshittification.
I'd like to add that it's very much possible we're also seeing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laffer_curve in effect.
As you alluded, equilibrium is necessary, and with all things in economics, the market dictates what's possible. Some markets are more lenient than others. Some are less transparent, etc, etc.
One better metaphor than the pizza joint is the job board.
Job board companies should be as reviled as dating apps. They have the same adverse incentive problem: There's little reason to visit glassdoor once you're successfully "matched." It's weird to apply for a job on Glassdoor and then immediately get flushed with competing openings... yet not quite as distasteful as Tinder inviting you to revisit the app to see your new leads the second after you've asked one out for a date.
There's similar complexity issues: Parties are trying to arrange a multi-year relationship, pressure is high.
+1 to Adam Mastroianni's comment below that people might conflate hating dating apps with hating the dating process. Maybe people don't hate Glassdoor as noisily because their hate is pointed at "the interview process" or "the job market" or "the economy."
I suspect recruiters have similar dispassion for glassdoor candidates as daters have for tinder candidates: you're awash with a mountain of fairly comparable profiles often full of embellished details. At least as a recruiter you're paid with benefits for the 40 hr/wk of labor. No such luck for the match group user.
Jobs-to-be-done theory explains why the coach airplane experience is substandard.
Theory author posits "you don't want a quarter-inch drill, you want a quarter-inch hole." In the airplane's case: you don't *really* want to be suspended midair for several hours, you want a week in Cancun. The airline that has the most tolerable "cancun" inventory will be the most successful.
Meanwhile: Delta offers Comfort, Comfort Plus, and now Comfort Basic (https://news.delta.com/introducing-delta-comfort-basic-deltas-latest-travel-experience-unpacked) which appear to meet your legroom specs. Far pricier than your model. It's likely some people love these since Delta keeps adding new derivatives. But also: Delta's proven that the greater legroom experience is possible, and yet, the majority of the cabin is still basic coach.
> "Why doesn’t someone else create a competing app that’s better and thereby steal all their business?"
I think this generalises to "Why is enshittification (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification) possible?", which in turn probably reduces to purely mathematical game theory.
However, there are a couple of answers that I think apply to social apps specifically (and not to, say, selling used cars):
***EDIT: Just realised that basically all the other comments say the same stuff that I've said below (and probably say it better). Nothing new to see here, please go about your business....***
Firstly, for social apps specifically, once a company has captured enough of the market, its network effects make up for *a lot* of bad behaviour. It's not much good your being on a super-ethical dating app if you're the only person within a 500 mile radius who is. So, companies oriented around network effects are super nice to their users at first, then "flip" once they've captured enough market share. Google's reneging on their "don't be evil" philosophy. Uber/airBnB's having used to cost less than taxis/hotels and offer more better protection, but now cost more and offer worse user protection.
Secondly, I think there's an information asymmetry (as described in Freakonomics) It's very difficult for the average user to tell a dating app that's trying to get you paired-off from a dating-app that's trying to string you along. So, the apps compete on superficial features, UX, etc., but not on the fundamental things that actually make the product worthwhile. Just as the used-car market is famously terrible because you can see whether or not a car has a fancy sound system or whatever but you can't see how much wear the drivetrain components have.
The "pair you off" dating app and the "string you along" dating app will both show you people of whatever sex you fancy, both will allow you to message people and ask them on dates, both will offer extra, er, stuff (not sure about this!) for higher payment tiers, etc. - but the *algorithm that chooses who gets to see whom* is entirely inscrutable. The only way to know whether you're being matched with people whom the algorithm thinks are genuinely likely to be interested in you is to use the app for several years. If you've fallen into the unfortunate habit of using dating apps for validation/attention rather than to try to get paired-off and leave the app, the algorithm might detect this and send you people who offer validation/attention rather than people who you might actually want to pair-off with - again, you have no way to know except to use the app for years upon years and try to detect the patterns yourself.
Is there a market for an app with an open-source algorithm? I would hope so, but I fear probably not:
1) I don't think most people are capable of understanding such an algorithm; they'd rely on other people to explain it to them. And nobody wants to get dating advice from the sorts of people who pore over open-source algorithms. The company could pay influencers or celebrities or whoever to explain how their algorithm works and say how wonderful it is - but so could your rival closed-source, string-you-along dating app. Companies can pay influencers and celebrities to say basically anything regardless of its truthfulness.
[Except for Nicki Minaj, obviously. She's an incorruptible, neon-Hayabusa-borne beacon of truth and righteousness.]
2) The choices we all actually make when choosing whom to date probably aren't exactly flattering to us. I suspect most people really, *really* don't want to see how the sausage is made.
> “The thing about video streaming is that high-resolution video uses more expensive bandwidth. So they have an incentive to use low-resolution.”
(Wildly off-topic and utterly missing the point but I think it's interesting so I'm going to talk about it anyway, sorry...) Video streaming services have an incentive to use the lowest _bitrate_ possible, not specifically the lowest resolution possible. If users think resolution alone determines the quality of a stream, they'll tolerate ultra-compressed 4K video but won't watch high-quality encodings at 1080p, streaming services would offer streams with really high resolutions but super-lossy video compression to keep the bitrate as low as possible.
(And this is essentially what we see. 4K blu-ray bitrate: 128Mbps. Netflix' 4K bitrate: roughly 20Mbps. If one wants high resolution video that's also high quality I'm afraid one needs to either buy physical media or else set sail upon the high seas.)
If users are unable to tell whether they are dealing with a fake account (organised by the app provider) this seems a mixture of information asymmetry - and something you didn't mention: lack of regulation. Drugs are another example for the need of regulation due to stark incentive asymmetries.
A dating app isn't selling a product. It's a service facilitating matching, like eBay or Uber Eats. It has network effects. Unlike car companies or pizza places, a new entrant can't enter with fresh inventory. Can't exactly grow bfs or gfs in a factory. If you try and grow some, the lead times are killer, nor do you have legal ownership in the first place.
Another thing that distinguishes pizza and dating is that there is no review mechanism. Most pizza are roughly the same but we care a great deal about differences in people. I can review a pizza place based on a pizza. There are no BF/GF reviews. This ties in to how Hinge differs from Uber Eats and eBay. The purchase frequency/volume from each seller is very low which limits how much reviews are worth, if they existed in the first place. This limits the spread of market information.
Adding reviews has legal and social costs. People don't want that, companies don't want that. People aren't convinced nor willing to pay matching services costing thousands of $$$.
Re airlines: I would absolutely pay 3% more for an extra 2.5cm of leg room so that my world doesn't end if the person in front of me leans their seat back all the way. That's like $6 on a standard flight! I wonder if many people feel similarly. (One intuition pump: "comfort economy" sections tend to give something like 7-9cm of additional leg room but often cost ~$80 domestic or double that international, implying that at least enough people to fill the comfort seats value the marginal cm of leg room at like $10, whereas your example is closer to $2/cm.)
But suppose NiceAirline does this on half their planes. Now I'm looking for a flight, so I search on Google Flights or my preferred platform of choice, and I see a bunch of prices for different airlines and flights I might take. Even if I'm perfectly happy to pay the $6 for extra comfort, I have to know that NiceAirline does this on some planes, look up the plane on the route, look up whether this plane is one of the luxury planes, etc. That's hard and I'm lazy, so I just pick the cheapest flight.
It's not an information asymmetry, exactly: all the information is available to me, if not directly in my head. And it's not pricing power, but rather the opposite: the airline has to compete so heavily on price that it's hard to compete on quality, because price is hyper legibile.
So maybe some other reasons why stuff is crap could include search frictions or forced competition on dimensions other than crappiness.
Yeah, I was also surprised by that calculation! Airlines must *love* selling those "comfort economy" upgrades. Though I guess a lot of those seats end up going to people in loyalty programs, who are just the kind of high-information folks that would be most likely to go through the whole dance that you described...
I want to make a comment regarding your point about clothes (fast fashion / Primark clothes that fall apart immediately). I'm not sure if this is an argument that generalizes or if I'm making a very specific remark, but:
I don't really accept the premise that enough people are not willing to pay more for better clothes, or that there isn't a market for this. The inside view for me, who is willing to do that, is rather that it's incredibly _hard_ to find! Like, how do you trust that the clothes you're paying extra for, actually is of better quality? You might think word of mouth, or "reputation", but my theory is this: any producer who tries to position themselves as a "better quality at a slightly higher price" kind of player, as soon as they succeed in generating that impression in the market, immediately faces an immense pressure. An incentive gradient that's deathly steep. A temptation beyond resistance. What if they now were to slowly decrease the quality of their products, and reap the profits? Not doing so, is an almost insane business decision. And a good reputation lingers, it takes time for people's opinion to update. Therefore, I claim, basically every brand that starts out with the best of intentions, ends up shittifying their own products and cannibalizing their own brand and good reputation, for short (or medium) term gains.
This is a continuous slide into shittification of essentially every brand that was once good, and by the time you or I, the average consumer, who kinda cares about this stuff and are willing to pay the higher price but don't follow the details of the fashion world, receive word of this "great" product or brand, it has already started or even fully slid into complete garbage. Thus it's very hard or almost impossible to find trustworthy producers.
This is some kind of market failure, although I'm not sure how to best describe it (information asymmetry? lack of trust?), and I don't think it's due to a lack of willing customers.
I think this is largely true, but FWIW inspecting clothing for quality is really easy on the margins. I think the issue is that the modal consumer will not do this even if you instruct them on how to do so, and botiques selling higher-end clothing have no customers (because the mediam consumer buys cheap junk and the fashion fan buys expensive junk)
I think this is evidence for shortsighted consumer preferences (or you can call it a Revealed Preference for junk so long as it's cheaper)
Here is a 24m15s video that will leave you able to skip past most junk clothing and which is pretty entertaining
Bernadette Banner's "How to Identify Quality in Clothing (A Rant)" https://youtube.com/watch?v=fuVU64m1sbw