New Tips And Triks For You

When Stanford professor and economist Paul Oyer found himself back on the dating scene after more than 20 years, he headed to sites like OkCupid, Match.com, and JDate to try his luck at online dating. As he spent more time on these sites, he realized searching for a romantic partner online was remarkably similar to something he'd been studying all his life: economics. In his book, Everything I Ever Needed to Know about Economics I Learned from Online Dating, Oyer reveals how you can use economic principles to your advantage in dating. Oyer, who is now happily in a relationship with a woman he met on JDate, recently sat down with The Date Report to talk about all the (actually interesting) dating tips you slept through during your freshman Econ class.

1. Know what you want. People end up on online dating sites for a variety of reasons - some are looking for casual hookups with multiple people, while others are seeking monogamous, longterm love. Knowing what you're looking for will help inform the way you describe yourself to others. During a recent segment of the Freakonomics podcast, Oyer analyzed the OkCupid profile of radio producer PJ Vogt, whose jokes about drinking and whose "casual attire" profile photos made him potentially less appealing to women looking for something serious. Oyer's advice to Vogt: "If you want to show that you're serious and you're ready to settle down, you should consider having one or two pictures that show that."

"If you have a positive attribute, you have every incentive to say that and to be forthcoming about it," Oyer says. "Whereas if you have a negative attribute, you can say it, because they'll eventually find out anyway, but the alternative is to just ignore it and hope that it's not a big deal when you finally meet the person." In other words, online dating sites are not the place to be modest.

7. But you don't have to put it all out there. In the same episode of Freakonomics, the radio producer PJ Vogt wonders whether he should include the fact that he has good teeth in his OkCupid profile. But remembering that people will make assumptions about you based on what you say on your online dating profile, saying you have good teeth is about so much more than just teeth, Oyer says. "They're going to say, what kind of person tells me about their teeth? Then they're going to start thinking, okay, is this a vain person? Is this someone who's sort of joking around? So you can see all of those possibilities and you don't know exactly which way it's going to go." If you are particularly proud of your great teeth, as you should be, it would be better to show that in a close-up photo of yourself smiling.

-Written by Christina Chaey for HowAboutWe Who knew you could learn so much about dating from econ? Which tips do you find most useful?

More From HowAboutWe: * These Nobel Prize-Winning Economic Theories Will Step Up Your Online Dating Game * I Went to a Dating Seminar at a Computer Store and Learned to Build a Stronger Online Dating Profile * 7 Ways to Drastically Improve Your Online Dating Profile Based on Science

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