The recent OKCupid blog, which gwern mentioned in Media Open Thread, investigated the impact of three different factors on users' perceptions of each other: authority (reported match %), profile text (present or absent), and looks.
On the bright side, the authority versus reality match-up came out tied:
If you don't consider that a good outcome, you're not yet sufficiently cynical.
If a picture is worth a thousand words, what are a thousand words worth?
... Approximately nothing.
And the winner is...
There is something on that in that blog. It's a little more complicated. They turned off pictures, and studied the rate of message responses, and the satisfaction users had with the resulting dates. They concluded that users strongly preferred to message good-looking users, but that preference for looks was not borne out in their satisfaction with dates.