A theoretical optimal dating app would make less money as engagement would drop off and the acquisition cost of customers would exceed the value that could be e

A theoretical optimal dating app would make less money as engagement would drop off and the acquisition cost of customers would exceed the value that could be extracted from them. The dating market is not efficient, it is a bit like a lemon market, and switching costs are vastly underestimated for a variety of reasons. It doesn't help that people are readily encouraged to leave their partners by third parties with no skin in the game. I see it as a general multi-armed bandit problem with a exploration–exploitation tradeoff dilemma with pretty noisy rewards. If the switching cost was more accurately measured then people would naturally do less exploration and more 'exploitation'. I think tradition helped find this balance with an emphasis of overestimating switching cost versus a natural tendency to underestimate switching cost (hope springs eternal) - tradition is a way of handing down the results of previous 'exploration' done by others to a new generation so they don't have to learn the population statistics independently from scratch and at great cost.