Earlier quoted context omitted.
What about car insurance? Is it ok to charge more to insure teenage drivers?
I'd say yes in principle, because the cost of providing insurance is mostly the cost of risk which objectively and significantly correlates with age. Same for health insurance for example. Taking more profit off younger drivers would still be wrong though imo. If the underlying cost of the service is legitimately and significantly affected by age, sure, charge accordingly. Tinder's case seems different. The examples…
Consider their COGS to be user acquisition costs. Serve too many unattractive people and those costs go up as people leave the platform.
With the amount of data they have, I'm sure you could reliably estimate the cost of any given profiles being shown to any other given profile.
This could be used to determine who profiles are shown to, and how often. One implication is that attractive but dead accounts will be shown more often to unattractive but highly active accounts. Another is that unattractive but highly active accounts must be charged more to maintain the same margins.
I am equivocating attractiveness with age here, but presumably there would be too much public outcry if they charged by attractiveness alone, so they my guess is they use age as a proxy.