If you assume there are plenty of suitors, then playing hard to get would advertise yourself to the folks on the higher end of the desirability curve, possibly

If you assume there are plenty of suitors, then playing hard to get would advertise yourself to the folks on the higher end of the desirability curve, possibly giving you more selection there, and having reasonable fallbacks otherwise. If there aren't a lot of suitors, then you'd probably want to go for the best you can get, because there's probably not much better, but almost certainly worse. I wonder if there's a good way to formally analyze this