Singapore is tapping a Nobel-winning formula to help its useless singles get dates

We’ve all seen those emails or spam ads, telling us of singles in our areas. Sometimes they get past our spam blocker and pop up in our email box. While most of us might delete them, some Singaporean civil servants might soon reconsider: it may very well be a dating service, courtesy of the government. 

FirstDate, a pilot program introduced by Singapore’s Government Technology Agency (GovTech), offers single public officers ages 21 to 35 one potential match. Once users receive a match, they have 72 hours to decide whether or not to connect. And because the Singaporean government can’t be too sure, the program relies on a Nobel Prize-winning matching theory algorithm to really get their employees together. 

“Swipe fatigue ends here,” reads the new pilot program’s website. The experiment taps into a familiar dating-app frustration: whether more options make it easier to find the one—or just make choosing harder. That’s why it’s relying on the Gale-Shapley algorithm, which is part of the matching theory that earned Lloyd Shapley and Alvin Roth the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2012. The algorithm allows FirstDate to produce stable pairings where no two participants would both prefer each other over their assigned matches. 

“Limiting the choice set resets the dating environment to one that is more manageable by human brains,” said Norman Li, a psychology professor at Singapore Management University who studies partner preferences. People can feel overwhelmed by too many perceived choices, Li........

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