The effect of sport in online dating: evidence from causal machine learning

Daniel Boller, Michael Lechner () and Gabriel Okasa
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Daniel Boller: World Bank
Michael Lechner: University of St. Gallen
Gabriel Okasa: University of St. Gallen

Palgrave Communications, 2025, vol. 12, issue 1, 1-13

Abstract: Abstract Online dating emerged as a key instrument for human mating. This research investigates the effect of sports activity on human mating by exploiting a unique data set from an online dating platform. We leverage advances in causal machine learning to estimate the causal effect of sports frequency on contact chances. We find that for male users, sport on a weekly basis increases the probability of receiving a first message from another user by 50%, relative to not doing sport. For female users, we do not find evidence for such an effect. In addition, for male users, the effect increases with higher income.

Date: 2025
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DOI: 10.1057/s41599-025-04566-9

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