What happends when an economist goes to a bar: Ray Fisman explains

An recent article on Slate.com has sparked a lot of interest. Personally, I love to see other economist getting their hands dirty in the field: collecting data, talking to people, and enjoying the fruits of their labour. And where else better than in a bar to observe economic behaviour? We all love to see the market system at work. Fisman's post is a good read. For the fast and dirty type, a few selections from the posting are below.

The Experiment: "To really understand what people prefer, you need to pair men and women randomly in an experimental dating service and document the decisions they make. And so for a couple of years at a local bar just off the Columbia campus, I ran a speed-dating experiment ... After each "date," participants decide if they'd like to see their partner again. For our study, we also asked them to rate their partners' intelligence, looks, and ambition after each meeting."

The Results: (1) "With the obvious qualification that we're talking here about a four-minute version of love and dating, we found that men did put significantly more weight on their assessment of a partner's beauty, when choosing, than women did." (2) "By contrast, intelligence ratings were more than twice as important in predicting women's choices as men's. It isn't exactly that smarts were a complete turnoff for men: They preferred women whom they rated as smarter—but only up to a point. In a survey we did before the speed dating began, participants rated their own intelligence levels, and it turns out that men avoided women whom they perceived to be smarter than themselves. The same held true for measures of career ambition—a woman could be ambitious, just not more ambitious than the man considering her for a date." (3) "When women were the ones choosing, the more intelligence and ambition the men had, the better. So, yes, the stereotypes appear to be true: We males are a gender of fragile egos in search of a pretty face and are threatened by brains or success that exceeds our own. Women, on the other hand, care more about how men think and perform, and they don't mind being outdone on those scores."

The Twist: "Another clear gender divide, this one less expected, emerged in our findings on racial preferences, reported in a forthcoming article in the Review of Economic Studies. Women of all the races we studied revealed a strong preference for men of their own race: White women were more likely to choose white men; black women preferred black men; East Asian women preferred East Asian men; Hispanic women preferred Hispanic men. But men don't seem to discriminate based on race when it comes to dating. A woman's race had no effect on the men's choices."

In closing: "Does all of this rational-choice stuff take the romance and mystery out of romance (just as some have accused my fellow economist Joel Waldfogel of taking the Christmas spirit out of Christmas)? I hope not. Our purpose is to understand how life-long relationships are formed. The first step in helping people find love and happiness is to figure out what they're really looking for in the first place."