Partner selection occurs naturally and informally, but it may also be organized through commercial intermediaries facilitating mating and dating. This paper focuses on the relationship between online dating and the business cycle . We rely on monthly data covering the period from January 2004 to August 2008 on the demand for online dating in France to study whether economic recession tends to stimulate the online dating industry. We find that during economic downturns, people tend to to increase their demand for online dating, which is consistent with anedoctal evidences suggesting that some people have more time to invest in online dating and that the marginal utility of dating increases during economic recession
