Some time ago, I reviewed Paul Oyer's book Everything I Ever Needed to Know about Economics I Learned from Online Dating, noting that it was "a delightful treatment of how economics can apply to a wide range of activities, not just online dating". Clearly, I'm not the only person who enjoyed the book. Andrew Monaco (University of Puget Sound) enjoyed it so much that he created an entire upper-level undergraduate course based on the book, as he detailed in this 2018 article published in the Journal of Economic Education (ungated earlier version here).
The course is really just an elaborate bait-and-switch, where students are taught economic theory and modelling. As Monaco explains:
Online dating serves as an alluring point of entry, but ultimately, the course is an advanced undergraduate microeconomic theory course with a focus on economic modeling...
One colleague has described it as “a Trojan Horse into the world of economic model-making,” and another has said that although it “may simply sound like a sexy course …it is theoretically rich and complex, wherein on-line dating is used as a vehicle to explain and develop other models of economic phenomena.”
Monaco doesn't present any thorough analysis of the success of the course, but he does offer this:
Student responses on course evaluations can also provide qualitative insight into the effectiveness of this course at achieving its objectives. On the surface, students overwhelmingly find the material engaging, as evidenced in a typical comment: “Online dating is a fun and intriguing way of presenting economic questions and analysis.”
Finding interesting and appealing ways of connecting students to the course material should be the goal of all good lecturers. I currently use a range of materials from many different sources (including Oyer's book and others), but building a course based around a single common theme (such as online dating) is an appealing alternative. Similar to Marina Adshade's course on the economics of sex and love, that formed the basis for her book Dollars and Sex (which I reviewed here). Or basically any course on sports economics.
While I won't be doing anything like that any time soon, Monaco's approach is certainly worthwhile sharing.
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