Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/236290 
Year of Publication: 
2021
Series/Report no.: 
IZA Discussion Papers No. 14259
Publisher: 
Institute of Labor Economics (IZA), Bonn
Abstract: 
Online dating emerged as a key platform for human mating. Previous research focused on socio-demographic characteristics to explain human mating in online dating environments, neglecting the commonly recognized relevance of sport. This research investigates the effect of sport activity on human mating by exploiting a unique data set from an online dating platform. Thereby, we leverage recent advances in the causal machine learning literature to estimate the causal effect of sport frequency on the contact chances. We find that for male users, doing sport on a weekly basis increases the probability to receive a first message from a woman by 50%, relatively to not doing sport at all. For female users, we do not find evidence for such an effect. In addition, for male users the effect increases with higher income.
Subjects: 
online dating
sports economics
big data
causal machine learning
effect heterogeneity
Modified Causal Forest
JEL: 
J12
Z29
C21
C45
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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