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.
It’s not really unlimited and people tend to take less overall
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.
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...
Also the free market still needs a central authority for any proofs.
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.
No online service can possibly promise to be more thorough in their due diligence than the actual humans who chose to marry each other.
That said, firms exist with that model.
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?
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.