Great Performance !

The two previous chapters were built around a pair of admittedly freakish questions: What do schoolteachers and sumo wrestlers have in common? and How is the Ku Klux Klan like a group of real-estate agents? But if you ask enough questions, strange as they seem at the time, you may eventually learn something worthwhile. The first trick of asking questions is to determine if your question is a good one. Just because a question has never been asked does not make it good. Smart people have been asking questions for quite a few centuries now, so many of the questions that haven’t been asked are bound to yield uninteresting answers. Read the rest of this entry »

Roughly half of the white women on the site and 80 percent of the white men declared that race didn’t matter to them. But the response data tell a different story. The white men who said that race didn’t matter sent 90 percent of their e-mail queries to white women. The white women who said race didn’t matter sent about 97 percent of their e-mail queries to white men. Read the rest of this entry »

Getting a date is hard enough as it is. Fifty-seven percent of the men who post ads don’t receive even one e-mail; 23 percent of the women don’t get a single response. The traits that do draw a big response,
meanwhile, will not be a big surprise to anyone with even a passing knowledge of the sexes. In fact, the preferences expressed by online daters fit snugly with the most common stereotypes about men and women. Read the rest of this entry »

Most impressively, fully 70 percent of the women claimed “above average” looks, including 24 percent claiming “very good looks.” The online men too were gorgeous: 67 percent called themselves “above average,” including 21 percent with “very good looks.” This leaves only about 30 percent of the users with “average” looks, including a paltry 1 percent with “less than average” looks—which suggests that the typical Read the rest of this entry »

Each site operates a bit differently, but the gist is this: You compose a personal ad about yourself that typically includes a photo, vital statistics, your income range, level of education, likes and dislikes, and so on. If the ad catches someone’s fancy, that someone will e-mail you and perhaps arrange a date. On many sites, you also specify your dating aims: “long-term relationship,” “a casual lover,” or “just looking.” Read the rest of this entry »

Among economists, there are two leading theories of discrimination. Interestingly, elderly Weakest Link contestants seem to suffer from one type, while Hispanics suffer the other. The first type is called taste-based discrimination, which means that one person discriminates simply because he prefers to not interact with a particular type of other person. In the second type, known as information-based discrimination, one person believes that another type of person has poor skills, and acts accordingly. Read the rest of this entry »

The voting strategy changes as the game progresses. In the first several rounds, it makes sense to eliminate bad players since the jackpot grows only when correct answers are given. In later rounds, the strategic
incentives are flipped. The value of building the jackpot is now outweighed by each contestant’s desire to win the jackpot. It’s easier to do that if you eliminate the other good players. So, roughly speaking, the typical contestant will vote to eliminate the worse players in the early rounds and the better players in the later rounds. Read the rest of this entry »

Think about how you describe yourself during a job interview versus how you might describe yourself on a first date. (For even more fun, compare that first-date conversation to a conversation with the same person during your tenth year of marriage.) Or think about how you might present yourself if you were going on national television for the first time. What sort of image would you want to project? Perhaps you want to seem clever or kind or good-looking; presumably you don’t want to come off as cruel or bigoted. During Read the rest of this entry »

“Fantastic,” meanwhile, is a dangerously ambiguous adjective, as is “charming.” Both these words seem to be real-estate agent code for a house that doesn’t have many specific attributes worth describing. “Spacious” homes, meanwhile, are often decrepit or impractical. “Great neighborhood” signals a buyer that, well, this house isn’t very nice but others nearby may be. And an exclamation point in a real-estate ad is bad news for sure, a bid to paper over real shortcomings with false enthusiasm. Read the rest of this entry »

Based on this conversation, K. then offered $425,000 for the house instead of the $450,000 he had planned to offer. In the end, the seller accepted $430,000. Thanks to his own agent’s intervention, the seller lost at least $20,000. The agent, meanwhile, only lost $300—a small price to pay to ensure that she would quickly and easily lock up the sale, which netted her a commission of $6,450. Read the rest of this entry »