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Bruch and her colleague Mark Newman studied who swapped messages with whom on a popular online dating platform in the month of January 2014. They users by desirability using PageRank, one of the algorithms behind search . Essentially, if you receive a dozen messages from desirable users, you must be more desirable than someone who receives the same number of messages from average users.
Then they asked: How far "out of their league" do online daters tend to go when pursuing a partner? "I think people are optimistic ."
In other words, they found that both men and women tended to pursue mates just 25 percent more desirable than themselves. "So they're being optimistic, but they're also taking into account their own relative position within this overall desirability hierarchy."
And the study did have a few more for people on the market: "I think one of the take-home messages from this study is that women could probably afford to be more aspirational in their pursuit."