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Comment by saint_fiasco | Hacker News Reader

> There are some things that you simply CANNOT express in a "free market" because the measure of their success cannot be expressed in market terms.

Sure you can. If you want to measure the success of your matchmaking company in market terms, you could charge users for your matchmaking service and then return their money if they don't get married. You put your money where your mouth is by betting on the success of the couples you suggest.

I think companies don't try this strategy because it would be too expensive for the end user. You would need to charge thousands of dollars to make up for the hard work of matchmaking and the risk of bad matches. Not something an internet startup can do at scale.

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There's also the issue of having a bunch of cash on hand to pay out. Plenty of companies do unlimited PTO or bar PTO roll-over, specifically to limit the liability of payouts.

Also, if the relationship is abusive and the abused spouse is beaten into a marriage, are they owed a refund upon divorce? Death? Incentivizing speedy marriages, as opposed to good matches, is unambiguously bad for individuals and society at large.

There's not really a way to do rent-seeking on matchmaking without breaking matchmaking, so maybe don't seek rent on the matching itself? Just let your revenue stream be advertising. It's fine.

Unlimited PTO is poorly worded and always felt like a scam to me

It’s not really unlimited and people tend to take less overall

> Plenty of companies do unlimited PTO or bar PTO roll-over

That's a good idea. In this hypothetical app, if a couple stays together for a couple of years they should forfeit the right to get their money back even if they later break up. This reduces the amount of cash the company has to keep, at the cost of merely promising years-long relationships instead of marriages.

> Incentivizing speedy marriages, as opposed to good matches, is unambiguously bad for individuals and society at large.

How is that unambiguous? It seems to me like an empirical question. Are people taking too many risks with their relationships, or too little? The answer is different for each person, or even for the same person at different stages of their life. Very ambiguous stuff.

Time spent dating, or in a long-term relationship, prior to marriage is positively correlated with enduring marriage. That is, people who date each other for 3 years or more prior to marriage are 50% less likely to get a divorce than those who don't[0]. Thus, it pays societal dividends to encourage people to take their time and really get to know each other before getting married. Saying "the sooner you get married, the sooner you get your money back" or worse still "stay together without getting married for too long, and you risk not getting your money back" specifically discourages the behaviors that prevent domestic violence (including child abuse). What I believe we want is marriages that uplift their members, and minimize spousal abuse. Making people feel like they can't afford to not get married is the exact same phenomenon that drove up domestic violence during the COVID lockdowns[1].

If you're telling me that more abusive marriages is better for society, I don't think we have enough common ground to discuss this.

0. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/meet-catch-and-keep/...

1. https://www.ucdavis.edu/curiosity/news/covid-19-isolation-li...

Nope because this can easily be gamed, since getting married doesn't need to cost much.

Also the free market still needs a central authority for any proofs.

> this can easily be gamed

There are other online services like Uber and AirBnB in which it is much easier to cheat by communicating with your counterpart outside of the app, that way you don't have to pay commissions and so on. It's a serious problem for them.

But this hypothetical online service marries people. Fraud is much riskier there, because divorce can be extremely expensive if your partner-in-fraud doesn't cooperate.

> the free market still needs a central authority for any proofs

Isn't marriage a relatively centralized institution? The central authority that marries people can easily provide proof that they indeed married some people.

Somehow I re-read your post like 4 times and still thought you were saying "get married AND your money back", not "get married or your money back".

So here I am, downvoting my own posts.

I will say that your idea is trivially gamed. What startup is going to keep the legal staff on retainer to sue every person who "breaks up" with their partner, gets their refund check, and uses it to buy an engagement ring?

In a free market an inefficient model loses market share and gets bought out. Then it’s converted to the efficient model.

That said, firms exist with that model.

And do they return the money in the case of divorce?

Probably not. If they got to the point of needing a divorce that means the relationship looked like it was going to work, so much so that the people involved agreed to marry.

No online service can possibly promise to be more thorough in their due diligence than the actual humans who chose to marry each other.

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