Abstract The purpose of the present study was to clarify and describe what image men and women present and communicate in their profiles on an online dating site. Further has been investigated if traditional gender roles and stereotypes are as pronounced on this online platform or if it offers a space to go beyond traditional formations. The theoretical framework of this study consisted of a social psychological idea and understanding of identity as well as a gender theoretical perspective. The methodological points of departure were hermeneutic and the data consisted of ten male and ten female member profiles on match.com. The results of the study was divided into three themes, the emphasis on positive qualities, the attractive body and project manager to one’s own life. The results showed that both men and women present a positive image of themselves in their profiles, both concerning inner and outer qualities. The results also indicated that a life with various social activities is of great importance, which implies a reflexive attitude towards life. To create an image of oneself is strenuous work in constant change. Regarding traditional gender roles and stereotypes about what is being regarded as male and female showed that traditional, stereotype ways of describing masculinity and femininity exist, but there were certain tendencies that a crossing of traditional formations takes place on this platform. However, the result of this study has also revealed that this happens to a lesser extent than we first thought.

台灣寂寞商機的興盛，以及網路的蓬勃發展，使網路交友平台越來越熱絡，紛紛進入產業分食大餅，但並非各個網路交友平台皆能吸引龐大用戶的興趣，進而長駐於平台之內，使平台順利成長。有些網路交友平台缺乏自我特色，最終落得合併與收場的地步；然而，有部分擁有強烈特色與清楚定位的網路交友平台，不僅穩坐產業前幾名寶座，更是不斷自我成長，讓用戶與平台間的關係越趨緊密、密不可分，本研究試圖回答以下兩大問題： 一、 交友平台如何建立用戶專屬陷入成本，增加其對平台的黏著性？ 二、 交友平台企業如何創造對客戶的價值？ 為回答上述兩大問題，本研究依序分析平台機制設計、探討平台建立用戶信任感的因素、研究平台專屬資產的類型、以及平台創造顧客價值的層面，並根據分析結果，本研究針對實務與後續研究提出建議。本研究提出以下結論： 一、 網路交友平台的定位明確，掌握以定位出發的核心機制設計，衍生開發功能，善用插旗、築牆、圍城策略，環環相扣，能提昇用戶對平台的黏著度。 二、 網路交友平台善用社群策略，洞悉用戶網路外部性的運作，會提昇平台對用戶的價值，也會對企業成長產生正向回饋。 / With a view to business opportunity of single people and a flourishing Internet, it is getting great demand of online dating businesses in Taiwan in order to divide up the market. However, not every online dating business can arouse enthusiasm in their members, not to mention building up the stickiness of platform business. Some of them are lack of characteristics and it result in the condition of mergers and acquisitions, and even ending up their businesses in the long run. But some possess strong styles and clear position, they not only having good ratings but also make tighter relationship between members and themselves. Specifically, the present study tries to answer the following two questions: 1. How do the online dating business build up asset specificity cost and increase the customer stickiness? 2. How do online dating businesses make value creation? By analyzing the platform mechanism, this study concludes that: 1. The clear position of platform and mastering core mechanism, and making progress in developing interrelated functions can increase the customer stickiness of members toward online dating businesses. 2. Online dating businesses which are good at strategy of community and Internet externality can increase the platform value, and also have positive impact on the growth of platform business.

The thesis and exhibition, Interaction: Portraiture in a Digital World, seeks to analyze digital portraiture today. I choose to depict concepts and ideas, as they relate to digital portraiture, through four distinct series of work, which encompass similar ideas and themes, but come at them from different perspectives. The work within the exhibition is comprised of several portraits of personal friends, family, and acquaintances, which have all been appropriated from online sources such as Facebook, and online dating sites. Because the portraits consist of people that I know on a personal level, are a collection of portraits that are derived from my personal social media profile, and represent individuals with whom I have frequently interacted with online, one could assess that in addition to being a collection of unique individual portraits, the exhibition is also a self-portrait of me, the artist. The exhibition includes Facebook Text Portraits, Nightclub Portraits, Online Dating HTML Portraits, and a Crying Girl Portrait, all of which strive to blur the lines between art and digital design, while addressing the function and meaning of digital portraiture today.

The thesis and exhibition, Interaction: Portraiture in a Digital World, seeks to analyze digital portraiture today. I choose to depict concepts and ideas, as they relate to digital portraiture, through four distinct series of work, which encompass similar ideas and themes, but come at them from different perspectives. The work within the exhibition is comprised of several portraits of personal friends, family, and acquaintances, which have all been appropriated from online sources such as Facebook, and online dating sites. Because the portraits consist of people that I know on a personal level, are a collection of portraits that are derived from my personal social media profile, and represent individuals with whom I have frequently interacted with online, one could assess that in addition to being a collection of unique individual portraits, the exhibition is also a self-portrait of me, the artist. The exhibition includes Facebook Text Portraits, Nightclub Portraits, Online Dating HTML Portraits, and a Crying Girl Portrait, all of which strive to blur the lines between art and digital design, while addressing the function and meaning of digital portraiture today.

Dating online applications have fundamentally changed the form of online dating. They are available on a mobile phone and are based on spatial proximity of users and ease of use. This diploma thesis focuses on users of these applications. This thesis is based on the assumptions of the uses and gratifications theory, which assumes that the media audience is active and uses the media to satisfy its needs. The aim of this thesis is to find out how individuals use the dating applications and what their reasons for using are. To collect data, I chose a combination of quantitative and qualitative approach. First, an on-line questionnaire survey was conducted, followed by semi- structured interviews with applications users. Research has shown that the reason for using and the attitude of users varies with each individual and can change during use. Keywords dating applications, Tinder, online dating, uses and gratifications theory, active audience, mixed methods research

Made available in DSpace on 2014-12-17T14:20:26Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 VergasVAS_TESE.pdf: 3797183 bytes, checksum: a230fe58f7c325737569d93a5fe23553 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2012-05-25 / Coordena??o de Aperfei?oamento de Pessoal de N?vel Superior / This research aims to acknowledge the virtual dating phenomenon. The research deals with this phenomenon in Orkut, a social networking website. Thus, it considers debates and forums that were present in a Brazilian Orkut online community called Conheci meu amor pela internet (I met my love through the Internet). As a staring point the research dealt with issues such as: what are the debates about? How can we deal with practices that question their own dating process? According to the initial hypothesis, these debates reveal different contemporary social aspects: 1) they emerge as a response to demands on behalf of a society that is rather reflexive. This reflexive element is fundamental for the constitution of the self 2) these debates work as support elements in social relations that are built upon this sphere. In this context, individuals write about themselves and constitute themselves as real individuals that acquire a sense as subjects; and 3) people discuss online dating as form reconstructing former experiences. Empirical analysis demonstrates that these forums and polls present themselves as a social phenomenon that allows a particular form of self presentation on the internet. In order for these subjects to present themselves they built their own self narratives. What is possible to acknowledge considering these narratives is that there is a predominance of the element of intrigue that is further solved and demonstrate a satisfactory result. These narrators then choose online dating situation that present happy endings and happiness that are associated to romantic ideals that are worthwhile being shown. The contents present in these narratives are dealt with by the research. Thus, this work defends the thesis that the online dating narratives are a mixture of facts and fiction once all experiences deal with romantic imaginary as well as personal dating experience. Thus, the research is an attempt to understand what goes on the forums and debates that deal with the fictionalized and dramatized daily experiences in the performances that are similar to games. This is possible due to the fact that there is use of romantic fables and concrete experiences realized by online dating / A pesquisa se prop?e a estudar o fen?meno do namoro virtual atrav?s da observa??o do Orkut, rede social on-line. Para tanto, analisa os debates travados em f?runs e enquetes de uma de suas comunidades virtuais, chamada Conheci meu amor pela internet. Como ponto de partida, colocam-se as seguintes quest?es: em que se revestem tais debates? O que subjaz ?s pr?ticas que visam interrogar os pr?prios namoros? Conforme as hip?teses iniciais, tais debates desvelam diferentes aspectos sociais contempor?neos: 1) eles emergem para responder ?s demandas de uma sociedade que toma a reflexividade como elemento fundamental para a constitui??o do eu; 2) convertem-se em suportes, na medida em que as rela??es sociais, tecidas nesses espa?os, aparecem investidas por uma escrita de si que indiv?duos lan?am m?o para se constitu?rem enquanto sujeitos de sentido; por fim, 3) discutem-se namoros virtuais com vistas a reconstruir de outra maneira aquilo que foi vivido. A an?lise emp?rica demonstra que esses f?runs e enquetes apresentam-se enquanto um fen?meno social que d? origem a uma forma particular de apresenta??o do eu na internet. No ensejo por apresentarem-se, os mesmos atores acabam por construir narrativas de si. O que se observa nessas narrativas de namoros virtuais ? a predomin?ncia de uma intriga, cujo desfecho revela-se exitoso, de resultado satisfat?rio, feliz. Os narradores elegem casos de namoros virtuais que se desenrolam sob a forma de uma felicidade amorosa associada a ideais rom?nticos como dignos de serem retratados. O teor dessas narrativas ? desses aspectos tribut?rio. Portanto, a partir dessas formula??es, defende-se neste trabalho a tese segundo a qual as narrativas de namoros virtuais s?o um misto de fato e fic??o, na medida em que s?o narrativas tecidas com empr?stimo tanto do imagin?rio rom?ntico quanto da pr?pria experi?ncia amorosa vivida nos namoros. Em resumo, esta pesquisa esfor?a-se por compreender f?runs e enquetes cujo cotidiano amoroso ? ficcionalizado e dramatizado atrav?s de jogos perform?ticos compostos pela fabula??o rom?ntica e pela experi?ncia de concretude dos namoros virtuais

This thesis deals with a pragmatic analysis of profiles of online dating service in Czech Republic. The main objective of this work is to interpret a form of profile presentation on an online dating site. The profiles are interpreted in terms of communication situation, of communication strategies, of the differences between male and female profiles and of the differences between different age profiles. Interpretation of the data is based on stylistic and pragmatic analysis of individual profiles of online dating service and on the percentage of relevant data. The theoretical part of the thesis defines research of the online dating services, existing theories and research of internet environment concerning the foundation of internet dating services, gender stereotypes in online dating, self-presentation online and choosing a partner. The theoretical part consists also of a summary of my own brief survey about people's attitudes to online dating services. The theoretical part of the thesis defines also the pragmatic exploration which constitutes the basis of pragmatic analysis. The basis of practical part of the thesis is stylistic analysis of the text parts of profiles and pragmatic analysis of text and visual part of profiles and the comparison of the percentage of relevant data. Results of the...

Syftet med studien var att bidra med förståelse för hur användare av applikationen framställer sig själva, jämfört med hur de konsumerar samt bedömer andras profiler. Studien tar upp huruvida konsumtionskultur och sociala strukturer påverkar konsumenternas användning av Tinder samt hur det uttrycker sig i deras konsumtion. Studien har genomförts genom en kvalitativ ansats som grundats i tre fokusgruppsdiskussioner. Fokus har där legat kring hur och varför personer använder sig av nätdejtingapplikationen Tinder. Det empiriska materialet i studien är analyserad med hjälp av teorier kring konsumtionskultur ur ett socialpsykologiskt synsätt. Frågorna har utformats genom en undersökning av konsumenters användande och beteende kopplat till applikationen vilket resulterat i följande frågeställningar, Vad önskar användaren uppfylla genom sin konsumtion av Tinder?, Hur framställer man sig själv genom sin profil på Tinder? och Hur konsumerar användaren andras profiler på applikationen? Studiens resultat visar på att unga vuxna konsumerar applikationen när de har en önskan om att fly vardagen. Konsumtionen bidrar till en uppskattning av konsumenternas egna värde och resulterar i konsumenternas självförverkligande med applikationen som redskap. Tinder ger utlopp för fantasi vilket blir värdeskapande för konsumenten när hen konstruerar sin egna profil eller när hen konsumerar andras profiler. / The purpose of this study was to contribute an understanding of how users of the application Tinder present themselves, compared to how they consume and evaluate others profiles. The study addresses whether consumption culture and social structures affect consumers' use of Tinder and how it shows through their consumption. The study has been conducted through a qualitative approach based on three focus group discussions. The main focus has been on how and why people use the online dating application Tinder. The empirical material has been analyzed by using theories of consumption culture from a social psychological perspective. The research questions aims to study the needs and purpose of consumers linked to the application, which has resulted in the following questions: What does the consumers wish to fulfill through its consumption of Tinder?, How do consumers present themselves through their profiles on Tinder? and How does the user consume others profiles on the application? The result of the study shows that young adults consume the application when they wish to escape everyday life. Consumption contributes to an estimation of the consumers own value and results in the consumers self-realization with the application as a tool. Tinder provides the outlet for imagination that creates value for the consumer when constructing his own profile or when consuming others profiles. The thesis is written in Swedish.

Two-sided matching markets are a cornerstone of modern economics. They model a wide range of applications such as ride-sharing, online dating, job positioning, school admissions, and many more. In many of those markets, monetary exchange does not play a role. For instance, the New York City public high school system is free of charge. Thus, the decision on how eighth-graders are assigned to public high schools must be made using concepts of fairness rather than price. There has been therefore a huge amount of literature, mostly in the economics community, defining various concepts of fairness in different settings and showing the existence of matchings that satisfy these fairness conditions. Those concepts have enjoyed wide-spread success, inside and outside academia. However, finding such matchings is as important as showing their existence. Moreover, it is crucial to have fast (i.e., polynomial-time) algorithms as the size of the markets grows. In many cases, modern algorithmic tools must be employed to tackle the intractability issues arising from the big data era. The aim of my research is to provide mathematically rigorous and provably fast algorithms to find solutions that extend and improve over a well-studied concept of fairness in two-sided markets known as stability. This concept was initially employed by the National Resident Matching Program in assigning medical doctors to hospitals, and is now widely used, for instance, by cities in the US for assigning students to public high schools and by certain refugee agencies to relocate asylum seekers. In the classical model, a stable matching can be found efficiently using the renowned deferred acceptance algorithm by Gale and Shapley. However, stability by itself does not take care of important concerns that arose recently, some of which were featured in national newspapers. Some examples are: how can we make sure students get admitted to the best school they deserve, and how can we enforce diversity in a cohort of students? By building on known and new tools from Mathematical Programming, Combinatorial Optimization, and Order Theory, my goal is to provide fast algorithms to answer questions like those above, and test them on real-world data. In Chapter 1, I introduce the stable matching problem and related concepts, as well as its applications in different markets. In Chapter 2, we investigate two extensions introduced in the framework of school choice that aim at finding an assignment that is more favorable to students -- legal assignments and the Efficiency Adjusted Deferred Acceptance Mechanism (EADAM) -- through the lens of classical theory of stable matchings. We prove that the set of legal assignments is exactly the set of stable assignments in another instance. Our result implies that essentially all optimization problems over the set of legal assignments can be solved within the same time bound needed for solving it over the set of stable assignments. We also give an algorithm that obtains the assignment output of EADAM. Our algorithm has the same running time as that of the deferred acceptance algorithm, hence largely improving in both theory and practice over known algorithms. In Chapter 3, we introduce a property of distributive lattices, which we term as affine representability, and show its role in efficiently solving linear optimization problems over the elements of a distributive lattice, as well as describing the convex hull of the characteristic vectors of the lattice elements. We apply this concept to the stable matching model with path-independent quota-filling choice functions, thus giving efficient algorithms and a compact polyhedral description for this model. Such choice functions can be used to model many complex real-world decision rules that are not captured by the classical model, such as those with diversity concerns. To the best of our knowledge, this model generalizes all those for which similar results were known, and our paper is the first that proposes efficient algorithms for stable matchings with choice functions, beyond classical extensions of the Deferred Acceptance algorithm. In Chapter 4, we study the discovery program (DISC), which is an affirmative action policy used by the New York City Department of Education (NYC DOE) for specialized high schools; and explore two other affirmative action policies that can be used to minimally modify and improve the discovery program: the minority reserve (MR) and the joint-seat allocation (JSA) mechanism. Although the discovery program is beneficial in increasing the number of admissions for disadvantaged students, our empirical analysis of the student-school matches from the 12 recent academic years (2005-06 to 2016-17) shows that about 950 in-group blocking pairs were created each year amongst disadvantaged group of students, impacting about 650 disadvantaged students every year. Moreover, we find that this program usually benefits lower-performing disadvantaged students more than top-performing disadvantaged students (in terms of the ranking of their assigned schools), thus unintentionally creating an incentive to under-perform. On the contrary, we show, theoretically by employing choice functions, that (i) both MR and JSA result in no in-group blocking pairs, and (ii) JSA is weakly group strategy-proof, ensures that at least one disadvantaged is not worse off, and when reservation quotas are carefully chosen then no disadvantaged student is worse-off. We show that each of these properties is not satisfied by DISC. In the general setting, we show that there is no clear winner in terms of the matchings provided by DISC, JSA, and MR, from the perspective of disadvantaged students. We however characterize a condition for markets, that we term high competitiveness, where JSA dominates MR for disadvantaged students. This condition is verified, in particular, in certain markets when there is a higher demand for seats than supply, and the performances of disadvantaged students are significantly lower than that of advantaged students. Data from NYC DOE satisfy the high competitiveness condition, and for this dataset our empirical results corroborate our theoretical predictions, showing the superiority of JSA. We believe that the discovery program, and more generally affirmative action mechanisms, can be changed for the better by implementing the JSA mechanism, leading to incentives for the top-performing disadvantaged students while providing many benefits of the affirmative action program.

This study explores online dating by studying the relationship between self-disclosure and self-efficacy in an online dating environment. This research study examines the way self-disclosure, self-efficacy, self-esteem, and gender interrelate in an online dating environment. This study includes, but is not limited to, discussion of the type of correlation between self-efficacy and self-esteem, the relationship between self-disclosure and self-efficacy, and the differences between men's and women's self-disclosure in an online dating environment. From conducting this study, the researcher was able to determine that there is a statistically significant relationship between gender and how it relates to self-disclosure and self-efficacy. With the results from the study, the understanding of how different variables relate to online dating and romantic relationships has been taken one step further as it helps fill the gap in the literature.