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wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the HBO Idea Cast, I'm Sarah Green. I'm talking today with Paul Oyer, Professor of Economics at

Stanford's Graduate School of Business. He's the author of the book, Everything I Ever Need to Know

about Economics, I learned from online dating.

Paul thanks for talking with us today. My pleasure.

So Paul I'd like to just kick off by talking a little bit about the economic

concept of search costs, can you just maybe describe

what the concept is and how you've applied it to this idea of looking for a life partner?

Well, in everyday life we're always going around making decisions

and some of those decisions are very costly. So when I go to the grocery store if I

spend a lot of time scanning the shelves I could be doing other things. If I spend a lot of time scanning the shelves, I could be doing other things.

And if I want to buy a new house and I go from open house to open house, I could be doing other things.

However, we invest in those search costs because it's worth it,

because we get something we really want.

And so when we think about a place where investing in getting what you really want is particularly valuable,

it seems like the market for a life partner is hard to beat.

So if we just go into some market where everything is commodity, I don't know stocks or bonds or something like that,

we don't need to do much searching, we just buy one share of whatever company it is, or we just buy one ton of soybeans or whatever it is.

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