Some Links Worth Reading
1. C. Kirabo Jackson finds that college-prep programs — with payments — really do work for inner-city students.
2. The Stanford Technology Law Review digs deep into Intellectual Ventures’ role as “mass aggregator” of patents; Business Insider‘s writeup: “It’s an ugly business. But it’s also perfectly legal.”
3. A 3D printer that makes bowls and ceramics out of sand.
4. British medical students turn to prostitution.
The Economics of Prostitution, Belle Epoque Edition
Two French economists, Simon Porcher and Alexandre Frondizi, have been working on a paper about the economics of Paris street prostitution in the late 19th century.
In 1878, there were an estimated 23,000 unregistered prostitutes and 3,991 registered prostitutes. Gathering data from 339 arrests, the researchers found that street prostitutes were generally young, unskilled, and well-paid:
Read More »They tended to work with pimps that were from the same area and clustered in neighborhoods where they could compete with regulated brothels. Street prostitutes not only generated profits for themselves but also for a whole bunch of actors, thereby switching the whole local economy to this industry, at the expense of the formal economy.
Economics Run Amok: What’s Your Price?
Freakonomics is no stranger to studying prostitution, as discussed in Superfreakonomics. We are slightly less familiar, however, with a gray area of prostitution — “dating websites” that connect rich customers with attractive poor customers. Though these are by no means a new phenomena, a website has recently come to our attention that uses a dating website platform to ask what we all wonder about in one context or another: what’s your price? Whatsyourprice.com auctions off dates and claims to be inspired by the charity dating model. It is divided into two halves: “Date Generous People” and “Date Attractive People” — apparently you’re either looking for one or the other. Upon a cursory read, the generous users seem to be overwhelmingly male, and the attractive users overwhelmingly female (and pictured in bathing suits). Each profile includes an “About Me” section and a “First Date Expectations” section. Several “attractive” members, it should be noted, specify that they will not fly Economy Class. Read More »
Bonn, Germany Taxes Prostitutes with Nightly “Parking Permits.” A Deadweight Loss?
In Bonn, Germany, brothels and saunas pay taxes. Yet street prostitution is not taxed, so that the government has given streetwalkers a competitive advantage. To ensure fairness, the Bonn government has constructed meters along the main streets where the women solicit, with each woman required to purchase a “parking permit” of €6 each night.
As an economist, I would prefer to see hourly fees charged, but the costs of administering a fixed fee are much lower and probably yield greater net revenue. The only problem is that the fixed fee gives an incentive to shift work time toward fewer nights per week but more hours per night worked. A clear deadweight loss from this tax.
[HT to DJ]
Not the Kind of Customer Review You Read Every Day
You never know what you’ll run across while reading Yelp. While sussing out Philadelphia hotels, I came across this review:
First of all, let me just say that, if you can get a room, this is an excellent hotel. Don’t let the fact that a transgendered prostitute was arrested for killing an occupant here and tried setting fire to his room in November 2010. As with any hotel, you should be careful who you let into your room anyway.
The reviewer gave the hotel four stars out of five. It wasn’t the murder (which, though I was skeptical, was for real) that led him to deduct a star, but rather the low water pressure and bad hours at the fitness center.
And you wonder why companies are still nervous about the whole customer-review concept?
Prostitute Pay in India
We’ve written about prostitution more than a few times on this blog, and in SuperFreakonomics, we devoted an entire chapter to the economics of prostitution. Now comes an interesting bit of new academic research from India that draws similar conclusions: once you put aside your moral views, it’s not hard to see that entry into the profession is driven by salary and career options. Read More »
The Sportswriter Is a Pimp
Things have been rough in the journalism business of late — so rough that one veteran sportswriter felt he had to pursue an alternate career. An award-winning sportswriter for a paper in New Hampshire, has pleaded guilty to running a prostitution ring. Read More »
Sugar Daddy Dating
A Freakonomics reader (we’ll call her “Sugar Baby”) is documenting her two-week experiment with online “Sugar Daddy Dating”: “beautiful women post pictures while wealthy men post their income and voilà! – the perfect Darwinian couple is created. Because the expectation is short term, it’s flirting with the title of an escort service, or worse, prostitution.” Read More »
and 
. You can also watch it on 