qui tacet consentire videtur

I’ve had more time to catch up on my j-dramas and anime since summer began. It’s strange since my mom has started watching k-dramas, but all the imports she’s watching now I’ve already seen before. This season is surprisingly interesting, with a few gems that I hadn’t noticed before.

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I am a huge fan of economist Ray Fisman’s work (Columbia Business School) on dating preferences, so I found this follow-up paper really interesting. From “What Makes You Click? — Mate Preferences and Matching Outcomes in Online Dating” by Gunter Hitsch and Ali Hortacsu of the University of Chicago and Dan Ariely of MIT:

Our revealed preference estimates corroborate several salient findings of the stated preference literature. For example, while physical attractiveness is important to both genders, women have a stronger preference for the income of their partner than men. We also document preferences to date a partner of the same ethnicity. Our estimation approach allows us to examine the preference tradeoffs between a partner’s attributes. For example, we calculate the additional income that black, Hispanic, and Asian men need to be as desirable to a white woman as a white man.

And how much is this additional income?

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So after the grueling literature exam, I went to see Spiderman 3 with the 6th floor kids to destress. For some reason they chose to see the film in the Apollo theater in Harlem. It always amazes me how much the environment changes only ten or so blocks away.

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