[bouis]

While I'm sure he knows this, most reasonably social college students reflexively trade up in dating and I would hazard to guess they are near equilibrium. Economics basically reifies these implicit social concepts. That said, most dating market choices are not easily explained with the perfectly competitive market in a vacuum analogy that gets used in economics 101. For example, the sunk cost bias is actually metarational in the sense that it asks: "Am I really right about the grass being greener on the other side? How important is it to me to trade up?" which incorporates the concept of subjective beliefs and risk which is not addressed in the perfect information scenario and may not even be something that's tractable to explain in a rational actor model