Week 2: Price Discovery: Attraction and the Front-End

Attraction as the market's front-end — the signal a party broadcasts before any real information changes hands

1 March 2027

Attraction is the front-end: the part of the system a counterparty sees before either side has disclosed anything costly to fake. Front-ends are cheap to signal and expensive to verify, which is exactly why so much early dating behaviour is theatre — a curated profile, a rehearsed opener, a venue chosen for effect. None of that is dishonest. It’s marketing, and marketing is supposed to be flattering.

The model’s job here is narrow: separate the front-end signal from the information it’s standing in for. A profile photo prices “effort put into self-presentation,” not “compatibility.” Confusing the two is the single most common first-date mispricing, and it’s the reason first impressions correlate so weakly with everything that follows.

Outline#

• price discovery: what a first interaction actually reveals, versus what it claims to reveal
• cheap signals versus costly signals, and why costly ones carry more information
• the front-end/back-end split: attraction gets you a meeting, not a verdict
• reading for next week: what makes an interaction recur, and why frequency is a separate variable from initial attraction