51 e suggest that online dating frequently fails to meet user expecta- tions because people, unlike many commodities available for purchase online, are experience goods: Daters wish to screen potential romantic partners by experiential attributes (such as sense of humor or rapport), but online dating Web sites force them to screen by searchable attributes (such as income or reli- gion). We demonstrate that people spend too much time searching for options online for too little payoff in offline dates (Study 1), in part because users desire information about experiential attributes, but online dating Web sites contain primarily searchable attributes (Study 2). Finally, we introduce and beta test the Virtual Date, offering potential dating partners the opportu- nity to acquire experiential information by exploring a virtual environment in interactions analogous to real first dates (such as going to a museum), an online intervention that led to greater liking after offline meetings (Study 3). JEANA H. FROST, ZOË CHANCE, MICHAEL I. NORTON, AND DAN ARIELY © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. and Direct Marketing Educational Foundation, Inc. JOURNAL OF INTERACTIVE MARKETING VOLUME 22 / NUMBER 1 / WINTER 2008 Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI: 10.1002/dir.20106 PEOPLE ARE EXPERIENCE GOODS: IMPROVING ONLINE DATING WITH VIRTUAL DATES W JEANA H. FROST is a Research Scientist with PatientsLikeMe.com; e-mail: jfrost@patientslikeme.com ZOË CHANCE is a graduate student at the Harvard Business School; e-mail: zchance@hbs.edu MICHAEL I. NORTON is Assistant Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School; e-mail: mnorton@hbs.edu DAN ARIELY is Professor of Marketing at The Fuqua School of Business, Duke University; e-mail: dandan@duke.edu This work is based in part on Jeana Frost’s doctoral dissertation at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The authors thank Judith Donath, Andrew Fiore, Shane Frederick, Amit Kumar, Leonard Lee, Jiwoong Shin, Juliana Smith, and Fernanda Viegas for their advice and assistance. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Jeana H. Frost.