The Business of Love: How to find a soul mate among millions of dates

Sammanfattning: The development of the digital environment has expanded people’s choice-sets in almost all product and service areas. In order to satisfy customers, online marketers and web designers need to come up with new ways of shaping online search tools and limiting customers’ choice sets. This study focuses on Online Dating. The purposes of this thesis are to investigate how the large selection of mate choices online affects people’s mate choice process and if the current digital environment leads people to make suboptimal mate choices. The subject is of interest since online dating companies need to adapt and manage the continuously increasing number of online daters. However, at the current date the consequences of numerous choices in the online mate search process are relatively unexplored in academic research. We have put forward four hypotheses to examine if the too-much-choice effect influences people’s online mate choice behavior. In order to use the concept of triangulation, it is a combined qualitative and quantitative study. The qualitative study is partly based on focus groups with people familiar with the activity of online dating, and partly on in-depth interviews with experts within the field. The quantitative study consists of a questionnaire. The paper adds to the research of online search processes, and gives support for that mate choice processes are affected by an online context as well as that parts of the too-much-choice effect can be detected in online mate choice.