佛罗里达州坦帕市和北卡罗来纳州夏洛特市的性工作者可以为明年夏末业务量飙升做好准备了：共和党和民主党全国大会将分别在这两个城市召开。在上一次选举周期中，这两场政治盛会分别在丹佛和明尼阿波利斯召开，巧合的是，当地性服务市场似乎同时出现了大幅增长。
这是经济学家斯科特•坎宁安(Scott Cunningham)和托德•肯达尔(Todd Kendall)对在线广告服务Craigslist的“成人服务”版广告研究后的发现。（此后，Craigslist关闭了这个版面。）
将西雅图和费城张贴的广告作为对照组——这些城市不会在几天内突然增加近5万访客——这两位经济学家估算出，在共和党开会期间，明尼阿波利斯性服务广告增加了29%至44%，在民主党开会期间，丹佛的性服务广告增加了47%至77%。我并不打算拿那些性欲过度的政治家开玩笑，这主要是因为大多数访客似乎是记者。
当大批访客来到一个城市，其中很多为男性时，当地性工作者会将其视为一个商机，或许我们不应对此感到意外。游客不会那么担心被邻居或同事发现。有些男人可能会衡量出钱嫖妓和找老婆或找女友哪个更有吸引力，从这点来说，身处一个远离家门的城市时，找女友相对而言就不那么吸引人了。
认为男人会衡量找老婆和招妓的成本和好处，似乎显得太过没有有人情味，而认为女人反过来也在做着同样选择的观点也同样冷酷，但这并非我的看法。近10年前，两位经济学家——哥伦比亚大学(Columbia University)的莉娜•埃德伦德(Lena Edlund)和马尔堡大学(University of Marburg)的伊芙琳•科恩(Evelyn Korn)发表了一篇名为《卖淫理论》(A Theory of Prostitution)的文章，以完全相同的抉择为研究模型。他们的目的之一是解释性工作者为何收入如此之高。论文摘要的开头便是一个让人费解的谜题：“卖淫工作技术含量低、属于劳动力密集型产业，从业人员多为女性、但薪酬丰厚。”这两位经济学家提出“婚姻市场说”对原因进行解释。如果婚姻可以为女性提供一种重要的收入来源，“那么合乎逻辑的推论就是，妓女必须获得比其它工作更高的收入，以弥补放弃婚姻市场收入的机会成本”。
男人出门在外时，不太可能对婚姻感兴趣，因此当地市场上的性服务会很受欢迎，也就不足为奇了。在埃德伦德和科恩的研究中，她们举出了采矿场、军事基地、19世纪美国边境城镇和在非洲城市性行业受男性过剩推动等例子作为证据。简而言之，美国政治会议没有什么特殊之处。或许更令人意外的一个观点是，一些女性只会非常偶过性地加入性服务行业。在一篇未发表的论文中，史蒂文•莱维特(Steven Levitt)和素德赫•文卡特斯赫(Sudhir Venkatesh)收集了有关芝加哥街头妓女的数据，这是与Craigslist上的那些广告截然不同的细分市场。莱维特和文卡特斯赫发现，在7月4日国庆假期那天，性服务需求增加60%，价格也上涨30%。事实证明，这一价格涨幅足以吸引一些女性在一年中有那么一天加入到性工作者的行列中来。
从经济角度来看，所有这一切都颇为有趣：性市场与其它任何市场都一样。但其中也存在一些令人担忧的问题。长期以来，购买性服务的流动人口以及经常出售性服务的人一直被认为是性传染疾病的病菌携带者。莱维特和文卡特斯赫发现，在他们分析的街头交易中，很少有人使用避孕套。或许，坎宁安和肯达尔在Craigslist上发现的那些广告是在促进更安全的性生活。但愿如此吧。
蒂姆•哈福德的新书名为《适者生存：为何失败是成功之母》(Adapt: Why Success Always Starts With Failure)，由利特尔-布朗公司(Little, Brown)出版
译者/何黎
http://www.ftchinese.com/story/001040609
The sex workers of Tampa, Florida, and Charlotte, North Carolina, can get ready for a spike in business at the end of next summer: the Republican and Democratic National Conventions, respectively, are coming to town. In the last electoral cycle, the political jamborees were held in Denver and Minneapolis – and there seems to have been a coincidental surge in the local market for sex.
The economists Scott Cunningham and Todd Kendall discovered this by examining advertisements in the “adult services” section on Craigslist, the online ad service. (Craigslist has since closed down this section.)
Using postings in Seattle and Philadelphia as a control group – these cities did not have almost 50,000 visitors descending on them for a few days – the economists estimated that advertisements selling sexual services increased by 29-44 per cent in Minneapolis during the Republican visit and 47-77 per cent in Denver when the Democrats arrived. I’m not going to make jokes about oversexed politicians, largely because the majority of visitors appear to have been journalists.
Perhaps we should not be surprised that when a large number of people drop into town, many of them men, local sex workers see an opportunity to do business. Tourists worry less about being spotted by a neighbour or a colleague. And to the extent that some men may be weighing up the relative attractions of paying for sex versus looking for a wife or girlfriend, being in a city far from home makes looking for a girlfriend relatively less tempting.
It may seem alarmingly cold to view men as weighing up the costs and the benefits of finding a wife versus hiring a prostitute – and just as stark to view women as making the same decision in reverse – but the idea is not mine. Almost a decade ago, two economists, Lena Edlund of Columbia University and Evelyn Korn of the University of Marburg, published an article, “A Theory of Prostitution”, which modelled exactly these decisions. One of their purposes was to explain why sex workers can earn so much money. The abstract begins with a puzzle: “Prostitution is low-skill, labour intensive, female and well paid.” The economists suggested a “marriage market explanation” as the reason why. If marriage can provide women with an important source of income, “it follows that prostitution must pay better than other jobs to compensate for the opportunity cost of forgone marriage market earnings”.
When men are in transit, and so less likely to be interested in marriage, it should be no surprise that sex takes off in the spot market. In their study, Edlund and Korn cited mining camps, military bases, 19th-century American frontier towns and sex industries driven by a surplus of men in African cities. In short, there is nothing special about American political conventions. What might be more surprising is the idea that some women dip into the sex industry very occasionally. In an unpublished paper, Steve Levitt and Sudhir Venkatesh gather data on street prostitutes in Chicago, a different segment of the market from those advertising on Craigslist. Levitt and Venkatesh find that on the Fourth of July holiday demand rose by 60 per cent and prices by 30 per cent. This price increase proved sufficient to tempt some women into sex work for one day of the year.
All this is fascinating from an economic point of view: the market for sex is a market like any other. But some of it is also worrying. Both the mobile buyers of sex and the workers who sell it have long been identified as vectors for sexually transmitted infections. Levitt and Venkatesh find that in the street transactions they analyse, condoms are rarely used. Perhaps those Craigslist advertisements Cunningham and Kendall found were facilitating safer sexual encounters. Let us hope so.
Tim Harford’s new book is ‘Adapt: Why Success Always Starts With Failure’ (Little, Brown)
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