Managing Congestion in a Matching Market via Demand Information Disclosure

Abstract

In online dating platforms, users tend to focus their attention on a subset of popular peers, leading to congestion. We consider the potential efficacy of an informational intervention, namely, the disclosure of peers’ recent demand. We evaluate our treatment’s efficacy in mitigating congestion and improving matching efficiency, conducting a randomized field experiment at a large mobile dating platform. Our results show that the intervention is particularly effective at improving matching efficiency when presented in tandem with a textual message-framing cue that highlights the capacity implications of the peer demand information. Heterogeneity analyses further indicate that these effects are driven primarily by those users who most contend with congestion in the form of competition, namely, male users and those who rely more heavily upon outbound messages for matches.