Male sex work as an occupation is as old as its female counterpart. There is little evidence from the historical record that male sex work was not present in any society where female sex work operated. Then and now, the primary buyers and sellers of male sexual services have been men. As such, male sex work has always carried the added stigma of homosexuality, causing male sex to be socially distinct from the more widely practiced female sex work. In ancient Greek culture male prostitution went by the name porneia. The term distinguished male sex work both from the accepted paederastia, relationships that existed between old and young men, porne (female prostitution), and hetaera, female mistresses.1 This distinction was more than linguistic. There were social restrictions on what a male sex worker could do and be even if he were no longer active in the profession, which did not apply to those in paederastia.2 Greek law forbade those who had been involved in porneia from addressing the Athenian assembly. Even in a culture with relatively lax attitudes towards homosexual sex, men providing sexual services to other men commercially were not granted the full privileges of citizenship.3 Whether or not porneia was a crime was beside the point, the very involvement in the market as a man who sold sexual services to another man was enough to render one socially cut off from political power.
Scholars have claimed that male sex work in ancient Greece operated to exacerbate existing class inequalities. Young men of the upper classes could avail themselves to a sexual and social mentor via paederastia, while young men from less advantaged backgrounds participated in porneia and faced the lifelong consequences of those choices. The actual practices between the two differed primarily through the social expectations of the relationship. While young men in paederastia could expect to be mentored by their older patrons and exposed to the arts, politics, and social norms of the upper classes, young men in porneia could not. The explicit commercial exchange inherent in porneia relegated it to an undesirable social exchange.
In the Roman Empire, men could legally engage in sexual acts with other men in exchange for money as long as their participation was voluntary and their services were not offered as servants.4 Male sex work could be secured by anyone – unlike other services in the Roman Empire, one need not be a citizen to be a buyer. Given the social class hierarchy, Roman citizens were discouraged from offering a sexual service to slaves, foreigners, or others of lower social standing. These social restrictions on male sex work made the practice particularly unappealing for Roman citizens. This meant that male sex workers largely came from the slave or foreigner classes. By the fourth century BCE political acts which restricted the number of slaves and foreigners reduced the supply of sex workers and led to increasing prices for male sex work. Polybius noted that male sex workers were regularly secured for a talent (more than several months of wages for the average worker) and Cato complained that sex workers were priced higher than farmland.5 With little in ways of counts of male sex workers, however, it is difficult to know how much of the price increases were driven by increased demand from Roman gentry as opposed to the supply restrictions.
The large-scale acknowledgment of the practice in the Roman Empire also comes from public policy. Beginning with Caligula (37 CE) and lasting approximately until 500 CE, the Roman Empire taxed the earnings of all sex workers and formal registration of the occupation was common. Historians now believe that while these policies legitimized male sex work, they also brought the profession to light and therefore discouraged many men from entry. The private practice could be tolerated, but public disclosure of the occupation was not. Archeological work has found evidence of male brothels, however, suggesting that public meeting places for male sex workers and their clients occurred with some regularity. The brothels have been identified through markings and depiction of homosexual sex in the building. The presence of male brothels in the Roman Empire has been used as evidence of the relatively open attitudes towards male homosexuality.6 In ancient Greece, young men would grow their hair out and wait at male establishments such as barbershops for clients.7
As with Greek language, different terms were applied to male sex workers in the Roman Empire. Male sex workers were referred to as exoleti, while younger sex workers were known as pueri delicate and catamati. Unlike its earlier Grecian form, male mentorship by elders did not include sexual interaction. The lack of sex in mentoring relationships may be related to the professionalization of sex work. Another factor would be the growing Christianization of the Roman Empire, which led to decreasing social acceptance of male sex work and homosexuality in general.8 By the end of the sixth century a growing distinction related to homosexuality caused even starker social distinctions between male and female sex work. As early as 390, penalties were harsher for selling a male into prostitution, and by 533 all homosexual acts, commercial, consensual, and coerced, were punishable by death.9
The history of male sex work is not confined to the West, although there are fewer historical sources specifically referencing the practice. In Japan, for example, kabuki was a place for commercial sex between men. While monks and Samurai warriors engaged in pederasty in a manner similar to the practice in Greece, kabuki commercial sex was largely practiced between social classes. This practice continued until the seventeenth century, when sexual conduct between men of different social classes was outlawed by the Tokugawa government.10
The existing literature on the history of male sex work does lead to some general assumptions on the way the practice existed in historical settings. The ancient practice of male sex work was socially and legally distinct from older/younger sexual relations and from female sex work. A key distinction in historical male sex work was the class difference or similarity between buyers and sellers. Class differences were grounds to label the practice as sex work, and this meant that the historical practice of sex work was, in general, something that took place between classes. Male sex work was a service procured by those of high social status and supplied by those of low social status. Within the same social class, however, the practice was generally taboo and discouraged. From the historical scholarship, we find that the commercial aspects of the market were embedded in social ideas about who could (and should) supply and demand sexual services between men.
Male sex work has always had to contend with changing attitudes toward homosexuality. In periods and places where homosexuality was socially accepted, male prostitution was more likely to be professionalized along with its female counterpart.11 When and where homosexuality became taboo, male sex work and all homosexual practices were commonly grouped together and sanctioned. Even in ancient times, the social acceptability of homosexuality had direct effects on the social acceptability of male sex work. This is not to say that male sex work disappeared, but the social recognition of male sex work appears to be related to the social recognition of homosexuality. This is in stark contrast to female sex work, which was commonplace, and was always separated socially and legally from heterosexual social relations such as marriage.
In medieval Europe, social sanctions on male homosexuality continued the practice of the late Roman era, which grouped male sex work and homosexuality together. In many instances, both were punishable by death. Indeed, in order to be allowed entry the priesthood, a man could not be discovered to have been involved sexually with another man.12 Despite these legal and social sanctions, male sex work continued to be practiced. Historical records now point to a renewed linguistic distinction between homosexuality in general and male prostitution in particular in the Renaissance, where the term bardassa came into use to describe men engaged in sex work.13
By the end of the seventeenth century male prostitution was institutionalized in almost every major European city. This institutionalization included public knowledge (for those desiring such information) of the places where male sex work could be purchased and a language that facilitated the commercial activity. In Victorian London, for example, the Piccadilly Circus was well known as a place where one could purchase male sex work services. Men would adopt styles that would advertise their occupation, such as playing with one’s lapel or wearing distinctively colored clothing. There is also some evidence that the urban male sex work of this time had changed from passive young men seeking to sell their services to dominant older men, to one where passive older men sought the sexual services of dominant young men.14 Without comprehensive information, however, it is difficult to draw general conclusions. While still a criminal act, the prosecution of such crimes was relatively lax. When punishment was meted out, it was rarely as draconian as in earlier periods, owning to the relatively liberal attitudes toward homosexuality in European urban centers.
American male sex work predates the founding of the United States. Although the colonies prosecuted men for sodomy, and in more than ten cases executed men for the crime, some of these cases are known to have involved elements of solicitation. In May of 1677, Nicholas Sension was tried for the crime of sodomy. A deeper reading of the historical record reveals that the crime was not simply one of homosexuality, but of solicitation. In the court documents it was revealed that Sension had a long history of propositioning young men in the surrounding community for sex. Sension had been privately reprimanded for his activity at least twice over more than 20 years of known attempts to have sex with other men in return for compensation. In his sodomy trial it was revealed that he had, in at least two instances, offered payment in exchange for sexual services. Samuel Barboe testified that Sension offered him a bushel of corn if he would disrobe for him, and Peter Buoll testified that Sension offered him gunpowder in exchange for “one bloo at my breech.” Sension was convicted of sodomy, but his sentence did not meet with any jail time.15
Historians note that this trial, and its instances of sex for payment, reflects the class distinctions in male sex work that were present in ancient times. Sension was a prosperous landowner in Connecticut and most of the men who accused him were of lower social class. Sension was first privately sanctioned to stop propositioning young men, and was only publicly tried when he attempted to sue his indentured servant for slander because that servant, Daniel Saxton, wished to be released from service due to Sension’s numerous sexual advances. Only after Sension took legal action against his servant was he investigated and brought to colonial justice. As Saxton defended himself against slander, he showed that Sension had a history of sexual advances toward young men that involved payment. Given the private investigations and warnings that had been issued in the past, it is likely that Sension’s acts would have gone uninterrupted had he not sought to silence Saxton.
In the nineteenth century, male sex work on both sides of the Atlantic was institutionalized in large industrial cities. Part of this was due to ever-increasing urban population and the greater personal freedom allowed in urban areas, but there were also legal developments in Europe. In the early nineteenth century, the Napoleonic Code ended legal sanctions against sodomy. Given the fact that the First French Empire ruled a significant portion of the continent, the decriminalization allowed the male sex trade to flourish from Paris to Berlin. Male sex also flourished in American cities. For example, in 1899 the New York City Vigilance League found that the Bowery district contained more than five places where male prostitution was well known. Reports at the time suggested that there were more than 100 male sex workers in New York City. Given the size of the city and the generally hostile attitudes toward expressions of same-sex desire, this number of male sex workers speaks to the prominence of male sex work in urban areas at the time.16
This modern form of male sex work operated under different norms than earlier variants. While it was still the case that clients were older than providers, on average, the sexual roles assumed by each took on a different routinized pattern. The class distinctions of the earlier era married to a new form of industrial masculinity, which conferred upon young working-class men an authentic masculinity that they traded for money. The higher-class clients were more likely to assume a passive sexual role and the male sex workers were prized for their masculine appearance and sexual conduct. Men in the military were particularly popular as sex workers if they acted as “trade,” presumably heterosexual men who were temporarily engaging in homosexual sex for compensation. Weeks (Reference Weeks1989b) notes that military members were also thought to be more trustworthy and ethical in their dealings with clients.
Modern sex work was more intimately tied to increasing recognition of sexuality and masculinity. While cities openly noted that the fairy – effeminate man – was a commonly encountered urban inhabitant, male sex work in urban centers was not focused on effeminate men. There were cross-dressers and transgender sex workers, who sold either the illusion of femininity or transgender sex work to male clients, but male sex workers were primarily prized for their masculinity.17 The sexual identity of male sex workers was less important than their ability to provide an authentic masculinity to clients who desired the new industrial masculinity that was developed during this time. With the primacy on masculinity, the earlier notion of the young sex worker gave way to an older sex worker would could more reasonably convey adult masculinity. Sex work moved from being about youth to being about adult men engaged in a commercial exchange for sex.
The dawn of the twentieth century presented a modern form of sex work that bore striking similarities and differences with regard to ancient and medieval practices.18 First, sex work then and now constituted an average age difference between client and sex worker. Older men, who were more likely to be able to afford such services, made up the largest proportion of the client base. Young men, some of whom were in fragile economic circumstances, were likely to be service providers. Second, there were significant class differences between sex workers and their clients. As Friedman (Reference Friedman, Minichiello and Scott2014) notes, this was different from the earlier class distinctions in male sex work, in that the new class distinction was predicated on the authentic masculinity afforded to working men in the modern era. Third, the change in the relationship to one that was transaction-specific was due to the fact that the circumstances surrounding sex work had changed. No longer was sex work part of the mentored relationship between men that also included some monetary and perhaps non-pecuniary compensation. Sex work by the end of the nineteenth century was an occupation.
By the beginning of the Gay Rights movement in the twentieth century, male sex workers had carved out a key niche in urban gay spaces. They had become an archetype in gay culture and they played a key role in public representations of gay people. Importantly, sex work became embedded into gay communities in a different way than it was for heterosexuals. Part of this is because the history of male sex work sought clear distinctions between commercial and noncommercial relationships between men. Without the sanctions of marriage and other traditional recognitions for family forms, the sexual relationships between men have been placed in a different sphere, putting them into closer social contact with male sex work and male sex workers.19 For example, in the early and mid-twentieth century United States, many gay establishments would be frequented by male sex workers and men who desired noncommercial sexual encounters. This is not necessarily because the two groups desired to be in close contact, but because the limited number of social spaces safe for male homosexuals left little room to demarcate spaces for subcultures.
This close social relationship has allowed male sex workers a prominent position in social representations of male homosexuality. When anti-gay political commentators made note of the alleged perversity of gay men, they most commonly cited the cases of young men who entered into prostitution relationships with older men as a rhetorical technique to label gay men as pedophiles and gay relationships as inherent power imbalances between old and young men. Young men became natural embodiments of “innocents” who were “victimized” by older men who could entice them into sexual exchanges that provided money that the young men needed to survive. Ironically, these charges were coming at a time when young men as a fraction of the male sex worker population were on the decline given the changing nature of male sex work. Still, the age distinction between clients and sex workers and the ingratiation of male sex work into urban gay spaces proved to be problematic as gay men sought social acceptance for homosexuality, while at the same time maintaining close contact with an arrangement considered as vice even in its heterosexual form.
At the other end of the spectrum, gay men themselves had begun to develop an archetype of the gay male hustler, a presumably heterosexual man (but clearly an adult) who provided sexual services to other men. The development of a unique gay masculinity in urban spaces borrowed from the archetype of masculinity offered by male sex workers. Although the growing acceptance of homosexuality in urban communities led some gay-identified men to provide commercial sex services, the archetype of the male hustler (and the industrial masculinity he offered) did not fit into the anti-gay narrative, but rather molded into contemporary constructions of urban gay masculinity.20 The male hustler was a man’s man – a masculine man with few (if any) observable traits that would label him a homosexual. In the scholarship on male prostitution in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, this modern male hustler archetype featured prominently.21 This type of male sex worker was a “hoodlum” or “thug” who sought to use prostitution for wage income, rejecting the formal labor market. The fact that these men were presumably heterosexual added to their allure in a gay subculture that socially celebrated nontraditional representations of masculinity, but still held traditional male masculinity as a sexual ideal. In fact, the development of modern male physique and bodybuilding industries has direct links to male sex work. Men in the earliest era of bodybuilding would seek male sponsors, an arrangement that would allow them to concentrate on weight training. The early history of physique modeling is replete with men who used their masculine and muscular appearance in exchange for remuneration that freed them from the formal labor market.
The fusion of modern conceptions of masculinity, which imbued working-class and lower-class presentations of aggressive men as inherently masculine, did have effects on the ways that male sex work operated in modern urban environments. Some male sex workers who adopted gay identities found that clients demanded “trade” – men who did not identify as gay but who participated in homosexual sex. Gay identified male sex workers would be inclined to describe and present themselves as “trade” for their clients. In a market where desire and demand are closely intertwined, male sex work began to take on more performance elements than before. This also meant, however, that the range of sexual practices expanded and could not be presumed on the basis of one’s position as client or sex worker.
In the most popular depictions of male sex work in mass media, male (homosexual) sex work has been depicted as a last resort for heterosexual men. Although the films Sunset Boulevard (1950), Sweet Bird of Youth (1962), Midnight Cowboy (1969), American Gigolo (1980), and Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo (1999) as well as the television series Hung (2009) and Gigolos (2011–) are the most popular media images of male sex workers, they actually present the least-typical part of the market. Women are very rarely the clients of male sex workers. In fact, the (heterosexual) male escort agent featured on the reality television series Gigolos noted that the escorts he employs cannot support themselves through work with female clients. Indeed, the program, despite being billed as authentic, has had to remunerate female participants, and some have never been clients of the featured escort service. The popular image of a male sex worker as a gigolo stands in contrast to the limited evidence that women have ever made up anything more than a negligible fraction of the client base for male sex workers.
Gay films and art films of the same era depict male sex in a manner closer to the most common experience, which is to say they depict male sex work as homosexual activity. My Hustler (1965) contains two half-hour vignettes of male sex workers. Both of the scenes are explicit in noting that male sex work is the buying and selling of sexual services by and for men. The documentary style of the film and its explicit homoerotic content were some of the first homosexual representations of male sex work. In The Boys in the Band (1972), a male sex worker is hired as a birthday gift, and the price of his services is discussed in the production. As public and academic discussion of homosexuality and prostitution moved to the mainstream, so did the concept of the homosexual male sex worker. The later representations of male sex work in film also reflected a new gay sensibility about gay life in the United States. For example, both My Own Private Idaho (1991) and The Living End (1992) feature the reality of HIV/AIDS as part of the lives of male sex workers. Later works focused on the professional lives of male sex workers and their personal selves. Boy Culture (2006) featured an openly gay male escort who was seeking to form a long-term, monogamous relationship despite his involvement in the commercial sex industry.
These gay films better reflect the reality of modern male sex workers. While the most popular representations suggest that gigolos are common, they have never been a substantial fraction of the male sex worker market. In historical times and at present, male sex work, in the vast majority of cases, is a homosexual activity. Sex workers and clients are male and are selling and purchasing homosexual sex. Earlier scholarship has always noted this, but has tended to concentrate on sex work as a form of deviance (not necessarily for its homosexual orientation but due to its taboo nature and illegal status), or as a means to study psychological factors related to entry into sex work. With the advent of HIV/AIDS in the 1980s, research concentrated on male sex work as a vector of transmission of sexually transmitted infections, where sex workers could spread disease.
While all of these scholarly goals are admirable, the reality of sex work as a market has been obscured. Neither in the past nor now is male sex work primarily about these factors. It is about the supply and demand for sexual services from a man by another man. That fact is reflected in the ways in which male sex work takes place – that is, how male sex workers secure clients and how clients choose between sex workers. Given that the gay male population is relatively small, sex work is better aided by technology than female sex work, as cities would have relatively small “street tracks” where male sex workers would congregate. Male sex workers needed to reach their client base (homosexually identified men), and as of the mid-twentieth century were using gay media to reach clients. Magazines and newspapers of the time regularly featured the advertisements of male sex workers in the back pages. There are examples of escort advertisements in the pages of the Bay Area Reporter, the San Francisco Bay Area’s local gay newspaper. The use of gay media was common in early sex work advertisements. It created the largest local market possible for male sex work services while also keeping the activity relatively discreet – clients would phone sex workers and arrange appointments. The earliest forms of communication provided coarse information for clients. Escorts typically listed a form of contact and a brief physical description, and, in many cases, the sexual services they offered to clients.22 There was one national magazine devoted to male sex worker advertisements, and it ceased publication only when male sex workers had cheaper options to secure clients.
The Internet changed the dynamics of male sex work entirely, in a manner similar to the transformation of gay society in general. While not fully supplanting the advertisements in local gay newspapers, the Internet allowed for easier entry and exit from the market, and the “feedback” features of the Internet allowed sex workers to establish reputations. The Internet has become the primary medium through which male sex workers secure clients. As the Internet has flourished, escorts have been able to distinguish themselves by creating online personas that were not possible in earlier modes of communication.23
The medium provided by the Internet allows the analysis of male sex work, for the first time, to fully embrace its economic underpinnings. Male sex work is not charity – it is a service provided by a seller to a buyer. For most of its history, however, we had little information about what was actually being provided and at what price the services were being sold. This is in contrast to female prostitution, where prices from a variety of sources have been known for some time.24 For historical periods, we have few sources for pricing of male sex work. Even in contemporary settings, the best estimates of the market price come from individual responses in work devoted to the experiences of a small number of sex workers.
For economic analysis this poses several problems. First, price variation in a market like male sex work could come from a variety of sources. Smaller samples of sex workers are usually confined to small geographic areas. Differences between sex workers, local market prices, and the substitutability of sex workers in markets can all play a role in the prices observed. Economic analysis of a market requires extensive information about the market. For nearly all economic analysis, this implies quantitative data. Measures of prices, quantities, product quality, firm size, and consumer characteristics are standard. Throughout this work, quantitative data will be emphasized, and the sources of that data are described below.
Second, sex workers themselves may be more or less willing to divulge their prices to surveyors. That is, the price information we have from surveys may be driven by selection, where only certain sex workers provide their prices. If this is related to other attributes (say, only sex workers who are successful and popular are willing to divulge their prices), we will be unable to describe the market in any detail. In other words, we would like the same price information that a consumer of male sex services would see. This would ensure that the analysis of the market is working from the same base of information that clients use.
This book exploits two primary sources of data to empirically analyze male sex work and its social and economic underpinnings. The first source of data is advertisement data for male sex workers. This is drawn from the largest and most comprehensive data on male sex workers in the United States. The advertisement data has been the key source for analysis of the market to-date. Since escorts post their prices publicly, the advertisement data gives a direct measure of prices, which differs from the usual approach of surveying or inferring prices.25 Inferring prices runs the risk of spurious correlation – prices may or may not be related to the factors that are assumed to be sources of price variation. The data used here comes from the universe of male sex workers advertising on the chosen website in the United States at the time of data collection. As such, these data represent the entire population.
Relative to other data sources, online advertisement data has several advantages. First, this data allows one to collect information on escorts’ attributes, prices, and information without regard to some of the selection problems that one would encounter in a survey of escorts. For example, escorts who charge very high (or very low) prices may not respond with accurate prices in a survey. Another concern would be that escorts in general would not report their typical price but, instead, the highest price they had ever charged. This would result in an average price that would be far above the prices actually charged. Second, escorts have one account on the website and may list themselves in multiple cities that they serve. Third, the escort characteristics are entered by escorts from dropdown menus; this is particularly advantageous for features one would like to control for in pricing models, such as body type or hair color, whereas free-form responses may be difficult to evaluate consistently or may be missing altogether. There are other sources that allow for free-form escort responses; these sources are not as comprehensive as the one used here. Fourth, the website is free for viewing by all: there is no charge or account required to view any advertisements, photos, or reviews of escorts.
In particular, the advertisement data is a set of nearly 2,000 men from the largest and most comprehensive website for male sex workers in the United States. Beyond its geographic coverage, there is a rich amount of information that can be exploited to uncover more about male sex workers than before. Figure 1.1 shows a diagram of an escort advertisement. Escorts list their age, height, weight, race, hair color, eye color, body type, and body hair type. They give clients contact information and also their preferred mode of contact (phone or e-mail), their availability to travel, and their prices and availability for in-calls and out-calls. In-calls occur when a client travels to the escort; out-calls when an escort travels to the client. Escorts also provide clients with the range of services they offer in addition to escort work such as modeling, erotic massage, and stripping. Escorts have a simple table they can use to let clients know their weekly availability. There is also the actual text of the advertisement itself, which allows escorts to write about their services and quality. The largest piece of the advertisement is made up of the escort’s pictures, which are uploaded by the escort. These pictures may be of any feature of the escort that he chooses, and may be clothed or nude.26
Figure 1.1 Diagram of online escort advertisement
One unique feature of the advertisement data source is that it provides two types of reputation measures that come from clients. These are proxies for escort quality, which is an important component in any service such as male sex work. These are survey reviews (similar to feedback on eBay.com) and detailed reviews of escorts. The survey reviews ask the reviewer five questions about the escort (four of which are “Yes/No”) and a rating on a four-star scale.27 The detailed reviews, “text reviews,” are the detailed, free-form client reviews described earlier. In addition to providing a review of escort services, clients also give the date of their encounter with the escort, the type of appointment made (in-call, out-call, or an extended appointment such as an evening or weekend), and the price paid, which I term the “spot price,” as it reflects the price paid in a specific transaction.28 As noted earlier, a key advantage of these reputation measures is that escorts have no control over their reviews – all reviews of both types are retained if the escort allows reviews, not a selected sample that is posted or chosen by the escort. However, a key disadvantage to note is that anyone can post a review, including an escort, though this sort of thing is likely to make up only a small percentage of the reviews.
Table 1.1 shows the summary statistics for the escorts in the advertisement data. First, the data contains nearly 2,000 male sex workers who advertise online. This is a large number of sex workers, and at a minimum, it establishes that the number of participants in the market is substantial. Second, male sex work is well compensated. On average, escorts charge more than $200 an hour. This is consistent with other estimates of escort services, which are close to the $200-an-hour range.29 Escorts are reasonably fit – on average a male sex worker is 5 feet 10 inches tall and weigh around 165 pounds. According to the National Center for Health Statistics, the average man aged 20–74 in the United States is 5 feet 9.5 inches tall and weighs 190 pounds, which implies that escorts are slightly taller and thinner than the average adult male in the United States.
Table 1.1 Summary statistics for the escort advertisement data sample
| Variable | Observations | Mean | Std. dev. | Physical trait | Observations | Mean | Std. dev. | Behavior | Observations | Mean | Std. dev. |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hair color | |||||||||||
| Price | 1,476 | 216.88 | 64.46 | Black | 1,932 | 0.37 | 0.48 | Top | 1,932 | 0.16 | 0.37 |
| Log of price | 1,476 | 5.34 | 0.29 | Blonde | 1,932 | 0.13 | 0.34 | Bottom | 1,932 | 0.06 | 0.24 |
| Weight | 1,932 | 167.11 | 24.54 | Brown | 1,932 | 0.46 | 0.50 | Versatile | 1,932 | 0.21 | 0.40 |
| Height | 1,932 | 70.43 | 2.69 | Gray | 1,932 | 0.02 | 0.13 | Safer | 1,932 | 0.19 | 0.39 |
| BMI | 1,932 | 23.64 | 2.89 | Auburn/red | 1,932 | 0.01 | 0.11 | ||||
| Age | 1,932 | 28.20 | 6.93 | Other | 1,932 | 0.01 | 0.10 | ||||
| Asian | 1,932 | 0.01 | 0.12 | Eye color | |||||||
| Black | 1,932 | 0.22 | 0.41 | Black | 1,932 | 0.02 | 0.14 | ||||
| Hispanic | 1,932 | 0.14 | 0.35 | Blue | 1,932 | 0.18 | 0.39 | ||||
| Multiracial | 1,932 | 0.08 | 0.28 | Brown | 1,932 | 0.55 | 0.50 | ||||
| Other | 1,932 | 0.01 | 0.10 | Green | 1,932 | 0.11 | 0.31 | ||||
| White | 1,932 | 0.54 | 0.50 | Hazel | 1,932 | 0.14 | 0.35 | ||||
| Body hair | |||||||||||
| Hairy | 1,932 | 0.04 | 0.20 | ||||||||
| Moderately hairy | 1,932 | 0.30 | 0.46 | ||||||||
| Shaved | 1,932 | 0.17 | 0.38 | ||||||||
| Smooth | 1,932 | 0.49 | 0.50 | ||||||||
| Body build | |||||||||||
| Athletic/swimmer’s build | 1,932 | 0.48 | 0.50 | ||||||||
| Average | 1,932 | 0.13 | 0.34 | ||||||||
| A few extra pounds | 1,932 | 0.01 | 0.08 | ||||||||
| Muscular | 1,932 | 0.30 | 0.46 | ||||||||
| Thin/lean | 1,932 | 0.08 | 0.27 |
Price is the out-call price posted by an escort in his advertisement.
See the data appendix for variable definitions.
The average male sex worker is 28 years old. While 28 is certainly young, it is a far departure from the young men described in historical accounts of male sex work. The median age of male sex workers in the data is 26.30 Escorts are also racially diverse: while more than half of all escorts are White, more than a fifth are Black and more than a tenth are Hispanic. Escorts in the data are racially diverse – 54 percent are White, 22 percent are Black, 14 percent are Hispanic, 8 percent are multiracial, and 1 percent are Asian.
For physical traits, escorts are likely to have black (36 percent) or brown (46 percent) hair (fewer than 15 percent are blond). More than half of all escorts have brown eyes (55 percent), although significant fractions have blue (18 percent) and hazel (14 percent) eyes. Nearly half of all escorts are smooth (49 percent), and 17 percent shave their body hair, but more than a third are hairy or moderately hairy (34 percent). Very few escorts are overweight (1 percent), and relatively few are thin (8 percent); the majority of escorts claim to have athletic (48 percent) or muscular (30 percent) builds. For sexual behaviors, 16 percent of escorts offer penetration to clients (this is known as being a “top”), while 6 percent offer to be penetrated (and are known as “bottoms”), and 21 percent of escorts list themselves as “versatile.”31 In addition, 19 percent of escorts advertise that they exclusively practice safer sex. Overall, the summary statistics for the men in the data are similar to the descriptive statistics noted by Cameron et al. (Reference Cameron, Collins and Thew1999) for male escorts in British newspapers in the 1990s and Pruitt’s (Reference Pruitt2005) more recent sample of male escorts who advertise on the Internet.
Overall, this diversity points to there really being no “typical” male sex worker. They come in a variety of ages, races, physical appearances, and sexual behaviors. At one level, this is what we would expect from sex work. Clients could have demand for a variety of men, and this demand should lead a variety of men to supply sex work. At another level, this diversity reflects the fact that earlier descriptions of male sex work that make appeals to a monolithic experience are somewhat outdated to the extent that this diversity in male sex worker supply requires a more careful description of the men involved in sex work. Lastly, the compensation offered to male sex workers shows it to be a lucrative profession. At $200 per hour, a male sex worker who sees one client per day Monday to Friday would earn more than $50,000 per year. This is more than the median household income in the United States, and matches the median earnings of male college graduates in the United States.
The second data source comes from transaction-specific data from client reviews of escort services. The data come from the online reviews hosted by Daddy’s Reviews (www.daddysreviews.com), the oldest and most popular client-based forum for reviews and discussions of male sex workers. This website has been in existence since 1998 and provides a rich structure for clients to review male sex worker services. The website contains both a forum (message board) for clients to discuss male sex workers and a review feature where clients provide detailed reviews of their specific encounters with male sex workers. The individual reviews of male sex workers are the data used here. A key for this data is that all reviews of male sex workers are held in a holding tank and individually verified by the website administrator before they are posted. Male sex workers cannot remove reviews, and reviews are flagged if they are suspicious (for example, entered by a competing male sex worker or by the sex worker himself). As described by Logan (Reference Logan, Cunningham and Shah2016), Logan and Shah (Reference Logan and Shah2013) and discussed earlier, this website acts to police male sex workers, allowing clients to inform each other about the quality of male sex workers – and this function minimizes the opportunity for male sex workers to exploit clients. Logan and Shah (Reference Logan and Shah2013) also note that it is extremely difficult for a male sex worker to create new identities for himself, as clients track them over time using this source. When a male sex worker changes his location, over time all of his previous reviews are retained and linked to him, and the same is true if the male sex worker changes his professional name. Male sex workers who have retired are not removed from the website, but are listed as “retired.” Male sex workers do have the ability to post comments on reviews. Male sex worker reviews can be searched by individual male sex worker name or geographically.
For each male sex worker’s review page, the male sex worker’s contact information is listed as well as all reviews, which are listed in reverse chronological order (newest to oldest). Figure 1.2 shows an example of a client review on the website. (Because client free-form reviews are sexually explicit, that field is obscured in Figure 1.2.) Reviews were collected using a script that pulled the information from the website into a database organized by the fields in the advertisement. As the figure shows, reviews detail the date and location of the transaction, the length of the appointment, the price paid, the client’s perception of features of the escort (height, weight, age, etc.), and the sexual behaviors that took place in the given transaction.
Figure 1.2 Example of escort review
The reviews also allow for clients to enter free-form text that describes their encounter in more detail. This field is read manually and coded for sexual behaviors not categorized in the reviews. In addition, clients rate the experience. At the end of the review, clients identify themselves with a unique “handle” username. The total sample contains 6,269 transactions for 1,418 male sex workers in the United States over a 6-year period. Table 1.2 shows the summary statistics for the data. The majority of transactions (60 percent) are hourly appointments, and another 25 percent are less than 3 hours. Slightly more than a tenth of the appointments are of long duration (more than 4 hours).
Table 1.2 Summary statistics for the client reviewed transactions data sample
| Variable | Observations | Mean | Std. dev. |
|---|---|---|---|
| Transaction measures | |||
| Hourly rate* | 5,452 | 227.07 | 299.23 |
| 1-hour appt. | 6,269 | 0.59 | 0.48 |
| 90-min. appt. | 6,269 | 0.06 | 0.23 |
| 2-hour appt. | 6,269 | 0.15 | 0.36 |
| 3-hour appt. | 6,269 | 0.04 | 0.19 |
| 4-hour appt. | 6,269 | 0.02 | 0.15 |
| > 4-hour appt. | 6,269 | 0.13 | 0.34 |
| Variable | Observations | Mean | Std. dev. |
|---|---|---|---|
| Escort characteristics | |||
| Asian | 1,418 | 0.01 | 0.09 |
| Black | 1,418 | 0.12 | 0.15 |
| White | 1,418 | 0.49 | 0.50 |
| Other race | 1,418 | 0.30 | 0.49 |
| Latino | 1,418 | 0.09 | 0.28 |
| Endowment (in.) | 1,418 | 8.00 | 1.04 |
| Circumcised | 1,418 | 0.76 | 0.43 |
| Age 20s | 1,418 | 0.38 | 0.49 |
| Age 30s | 1,418 | 0.26 | 0.44 |
| Age 40s | 1,418 | 0.05 | 0.22 |
| Age 50s | 1,418 | 0.31 | 0.46 |
| BMI | 1,418 | 24.79 | 2.71 |
| (BMI)^2 | 1,418 | 621.87 | 140.82 |
| Height (cm) | 1,418 | 179.81 | 6.58 |
| Weight (kg) | 1,418 | 80.35 | 10.74 |
| Variable | Observations | Mean | Std. dev. |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sexual behaviors | |||
| Versatile | 6,269 | 0.40 | 0.46 |
| Top | 6,269 | 0.37 | 0.44 |
| Bottom | 6,269 | 0.17 | 0.25 |
| No anal sex | 6,269 | 0.03 | 0.17 |
| Kissing | 6,269 | 0.62 | 0.49 |
| Masturbation, mutual | 6,269 | 0.49 | 0.50 |
| Masturbation, receives | 6,269 | 0.03 | 0.18 |
| Masturbation, provides | 6,269 | 0.02 | 0.15 |
| No masturbation | 6,269 | 0.43 | 0.07 |
| No condom | 6,269 | 0.20 | 0.29 |
Note: Sexual behaviors are defined from the perspective of the escort.
* Hourly rate is defined for appointments lasting less than 4 hours.
“No condom” requires that the client noted penetration in the transaction.
For the transactions, I find that the average price of an hourly session is $227, consistent with other estimates of male sex worker services from escort advertisements and the advertisement data. As a check against the advertisement data, the basic features are quite comparable. In terms of escort characteristics, the largest proportion of male sex workers in the transaction data are White (49 percent), while a significant share are another race (30 percent). For age, nearly 40 percent of escorts are noted by clients to be in their twenties, and more than a quarter in their thirties (26 percent).
The transaction data establishes that male sex work does involve sex. In terms of sexual behaviors, 37 percent of transactions involved male sex workers penetrating clients, 17 percent involved clients penetrating sex workers, and 40 percent involved both client and male sex worker penetration. Only a small fraction of transactions, fewer than 5 percent, involved no penetration.
Other sexual details show that male sex work involves more than just sexual services, but extends to other intimate behavior. More than half (62 percent) of transactions involved kissing and more than half (54 percent) involved masturbation. In addition, 80 percent of transactions involved sex with condoms, which suggests that male sex work is nearly as likely to involve condoms as noncommercial gay sex.32 Overall, the summary statistics for the male subjects (age, race, height, weight, etc.) are similar to the descriptive statistics noted by Cameron et al. (Reference Cameron, Collins and Thew1999), Pruitt (Reference Pruitt2005), Logan (Reference Logan2010), and Logan (Reference Logan, Cunningham and Shah2016) in analysis of male sex worker advertisements. The behaviors described in the transactions are also consistent with the patterns seen in small-sample surveys of clients, such as those in Grov et al. (2013).
These two data sources give us information on both the supply and demand for male sex work services. The advertisements give us a rich set of information akin to that used in most market studies. From all comparisons, the data appears to be consistent with data from smaller samples, but is more diverse than the smaller samples in that it is national in scope and contains a more diverse range of men – racially, physically, and sexually. In addition, the availability of price information is particularly important as these two data sources are the largest available sources of information on the prices of male sex work in the United States. Since both data sources also contain additional personal and geographic measures, there are a number of additional items in advertisements and transactions that allow us to test whether there are significant price differentials that are driven by economic or social phenomena. Obtaining prices and detailed information for such a large illegal market is rare, and the recent criminal prosecution of male sex worker websites decreases the likelihood that this sort of analysis can be consistently performed into the future. Nevertheless, the remaining chapters of this book will investigate the present (and, perhaps, future) status of male sex work in the United States.
Male sex work presents a number of challenges for traditional market analysis. Despite its appearing online in a manner similar to that of other products in the age of the Internet, an economic approach to male sex work must begin with by considering several preliminaries that we usually neglect in economic analysis because we can safely assume them away. For example, in a traditional market we are not usually worried about whether prices in the market accurately reflect equilibrium prices – the point where producer supply and consumer demand intersect. When we observe a price in an online marketplace we take that to mean that the firm is choosing the price to maximize profit, and implicitly assume that the maximization takes into account consumer demand for the good.
If the prices in the market do not reflect underlying economic principles, it is difficult to know how this market operates, or if it operates at all. A traditional supply-and-demand approach would be inappropriate if observed prices had little relationship to economic primitives. The illicit nature of the transactions in male sex work make it difficult to argue that the market “gets prices right” simply because they are publically posted online. After all, in what other illegal market are the prices of goods and services openly displayed? The basic tenets of market analysis require that we first confirm that the prices in the market reflect underlying fundamentals about consumer and producer behavior. The first question to answer is the most basic: Does this market work? (And if so, how does it work?)
To answer this question, we must step back and think more abstractly about what a sex worker transaction is. At its most basic level, sex work is a contract. Whether purchasing gasoline, a candy bar, or a home, transactions are contracts. A good or service is sold at a specific price offered by a seller to a buyer at a specific place and time. The contract does not have to be formal or written, and the law acknowledges that most contracts are informal ones whose terms are implied by the context of the transaction itself. Payment terms are stipulated and our legal system enforces these contracts if they are disputed. This helps both buyers and sellers – if the good or service is not delivered as advertised, or if payment is not received, either party can turn to the courts to have the contract enforced.
If a consumer were purchasing shoes from an online retailer, for example, the customer would be confident that the product he or she ordered would be the product they would receive. If this turned out not to be the case, they could resort to a payment service, the vendor, or even the courts if they were duped and either sold a different product or received nothing. In other words, they would buy with confidence – if not confidence in the seller, than certainly confidence in a system that would enforce or void their contract, depending on the situation. The same applies for the seller. For that reason, analysis of the market would proceed with an understanding that both buyers and sellers are acting with full faith that their transactions will be completed. The analysis of markets usually presumes that contracts will be enforced.
In an illegal market such as male sex work this presumption does not hold. Courts will not aid those seeking to enforce contracts for illegal acts. This poses a problem for market analysis of male sex work because we cannot assume that buyers and sellers are acting with any confidence that their transactions will be enforced. We therefore lose confidence that what we observe from the illegal market is what actually occurs. In other words, we need to first check that the prices we observe from these online sources are plausibly related to actual transactions.
In addition to formal enforcement, information is also critically important in markets. Economists have long recognized that information exchanged between buyers and sellers helps to ensure that more transactions will take place. Even with contract enforcement, it is still possible that information will improve market function, lead to more transactions, and increase consumer welfare. In the classic example, if a seller offers a used car for a certain price, any reasonable buyer would have to fear that the car may be worth (much) less than the advertised price. Unless the seller can provide additional information about the car’s quality or offer a guarantee, it is unlikely that a buyer will be found at the price advertised. In this case, the seller has more information than the buyer, and a smart buyer will realize this and naturally fear that he or she can be duped by the seller. This case of asymmetric information can stop transactions before they start. In the most extreme case, no buyer will be found.1
Even when there is contract enforcement, buyers and sellers would rather not use them. Contract enforcement is costly in both time and money, and buyers will rightly be wary of sellers whom they do not trust. The seller must therefore provide a great deal of information to the buyer in order for the transaction to take place. As such, information helps to make transactions possible because they build trust between a buyer and seller. The market can and does take information into account, and the more objective the information the better. One reason this information can be taken into account is because it, too, is an implicit part of the transaction.
Male sex work does not necessarily have this market structure. While the information structure of the online market is quite rich, the transactions themselves are completely illegal. This is the reason the Department of Homeland Security moved to close Rentboy.com in 2015 – the federal government argued that the website was facilitating prostitution through the website, even though the website did not profit from transactions. Every transaction that takes place within male sex work is done with full knowledge that any agreements between sex worker and client cannot be enforced. For economic analysis, this creates a serious problem. Formal enforcement is often seen as the cornerstone of contracts. While information can overcome the problems of asymmetric information, this assumes that the information provided is credible and verifiable, which is made more likely when contracts can be enforced.2 At a minimum, if the information were false economists assume that there would be a means of redress for fraud. While the use of formal institutions such as courts is rare relative to the volume of transactions, the standard argument is that the presence of formal institutions gives contracts their authority and information its credibility. In Schelling’s classic terminology, “the power to sue and be sued” gives parties the ability to make credible exchanges of information and enforceable commitments, a prerequisite to most transactions.3
Without any means of redress, the information that buyers and sellers share would have little value. Since there would be no punishment for misrepresentation, a reasonable consumer would heavily discount all promises made by sellers. With no recourse for fraud, gross misrepresentation, or failure to provide the service, the market might not exist at all – no buyer would trust any of the information provided by a seller, and honest sellers would not be able to distinguish themselves from fraudulent ones. This implies that what we see online is an illusion with little connection to the actual practice of male sex work.
This is not to say that economists are naïve and always assume that formal enforcement is necessary or available. There are many transactions that take place without formal enforcement, and some that do not require the presence of formal enforcement. Numerous studies have documented how informal networks, long-term relationships, and reputations overcome problems of asymmetric information. Indeed, researchers have developed large literatures that look at limited contractibility and situations where formal enforcement is costly, as a way to consider the additional mechanisms that must be in place if existing institutions are lacking or unable to settle disputes.4 The literature has not developed an empirical answer to whether the value of information without formal enforcement approaches its value when formal enforcement is present, however.
This question matters a great deal for the study of the market for male sex work. Without an answer to this question it is not clear that this market behaves in a way that can be described by traditional economic theory. There is information transmitted in the market, but the question is whether (and how) it is valued. In most illegal markets this is not a problem because the good exchanged (say, narcotics) is done in a face-to-face process. Reputations, networks, and relationships are key in most illegal markets, and prices are private and negotiated directly between buyer and seller. In the modern world for male sex work, however, this is not so. Male escorts are not hired off of the street. Rather, they are selected online in a highly impersonal process. There are few escort agencies that could act to vouch for a sex worker – the websites simply host advertisements. Reputations established online could be entirely false. Men enter the market regularly, and new entrants need to be able to establish themselves in the industry like any other service provider, but there are few ways to do this in an illegal market. Most important, every client knows this to be the case.
The question, “Does this market work?” is therefore actually two related questions: Are formal enforcement mechanisms necessary in order for the information that male sex workers and clients share to have value? And if not, what is the value of information in this environment without formal enforcement? These questions are refinements of the basic question asked before, and get to the heart of the issue – in order to study the market for male sex work in a traditional way, we first need to know whether the market functions like a traditional market. In traditional markets, information has value, and if the information in this market has no value, then it is unlikely that the prices and quantities correspond to what we would assume in traditional supply and demand analysis.
The problem is most illegal markets have coarse information environments. Take the example of illegal narcotics. It is rare that someone looking to purchase drugs can choose between several sellers the way that someone shopping for a book would. Most illegal markets are also highly secretive and heavily dependent on personal connections. Unlike regulated businesses, illegal markets work by word of mouth and knowledge of the goods and services being provided is not usually in plain view. In these markets, reputations and networks operate to ensure that transactions take place. Given the types of networks, it is challenging to obtain information on prices, quantities, and consumer and producer behavior, making empirical answers to these questions especially difficult. The online market for male sex work must overcome the problems posed by asymmetric information but in an impersonal manner for an illegal service, a very tall order.
So, then, how does this market work? Does it get prices right? In this chapter, I show how the male sex work market leverages high technology and a rich information structure to make this market work. I begin by documenting the ways in which the clients of male sex workers informally police the market: by informing other clients of deceptive sex workers and by reviewing sex workers on independent, client-owned websites. The informal policing in the market is critically important and allows this market to function. In economic terms, the policing raises the cost of misrepresentation for would-be fraudulent escorts and simultaneously rewards the truthful self-disclosure of honest escorts. This acts to encourage credible escorts to enter or remain in the market and to prevent fraudulent escorts from entering or persisting in the market. In an illegal market such as male sex work this policing works as one of the only means of enforcement, and it is entirely informal.
I exploit this institutional knowledge further to identify the specific information clients treat as a signal of escort quality. Both clients and escorts explicitly mention face pictures in discussions of escort credibility and misrepresentation. Using narrative evidence from qualitative studies, news reports, and online forums, I show that clients look for face pictures in an escort’s advertisement as a sign that the escort is trustworthy. Being mentioned as the signal of escort trustworthiness is one thing, though, and whether the market values that information is another. If this market is well functioning, the signal of quality should have value.
The market values face pictures, and escorts who post face pictures are able to earn 11 percent more than escorts who do not, on average. In dollar terms, this would be in excess of an additional $10,000 per year in earnings. Spot prices – specific transaction prices recorded by clients – independently confirm the estimates from advertised prices. This is important because spot prices are prices we know that clients actually paid, which could be different from the prices that have been advertised. Consistent with the institutional analysis, I find that escorts who post pictures of their faces receive a sizable price premium: twice the premium to that on pictures in general. Indeed, the premium that accrues to pictures is actually completely attributable to face pictures.
This finding is robust with regard to a number of considerations. First, it holds when looking at escorts who have no reputation measures in their advertisements. This implies that new entrants to the market understand the value of face pictures, and price their services accordingly. Second, the premium holds when looking at spot prices only. This means that the premium is not an artifact of escorts with face pictures simply posting higher prices than others – clients actually do pay more for the services of escorts who post their face pictures. Third, I find that the premium is not driven by beauty. It could certainly be the case that only attractive escorts show pictures of their faces, and this would mean that the value of face pictures is not about information in an abstract sense but about the physical features revealed in face pictures. I find that the premium remains even when controlling for the physical beauty of the male escort.
Male sex workers and their clients successfully overcome the problem of asymmetric information in an illegal market. I show how this market functions without formal enforcement, describing how clients police the market and identify the specific information consumers take as the signal of quality in this market. Interestingly, the per-picture price premium I estimate, 1.7 percent, is similar to the per-picture premium observed for used automobiles on eBay.com.5 Irrespective of the reputational concerns of escorts, I document how client policing can increase the costs of doing business for low-quality escorts. Increasing their cost is one of the primary ways of minimizing their numbers. While previous empirical work looks at how information technology improves market function, I provide the first evidence that an illegal online market is quite responsive to information, even when it cannot be verified or where misrepresentations cannot be punished.6
The market for male sex work provides a case where the richness of the information environment overcomes some of the problems of asymmetric information. The illegality of the market and the near-impossibility of guaranteeing truthful disclosure imply that the market should disappear or be a market where information has dubious value. However, I find that clients informally police the market, successfully punishing misrepresentation and rewarding credible escorts. This enables male escorts to signal their quality and allows prices in the market to respond accordingly. Despite its being an illegal market, male sex work exploits high technology to ensure that the market functions well. The answer to the question, “Does this market work?” is, despite obstacles generally presented by illegal markets, “Yes.”
The Online Market for Male Escort Services
The male sex work market now largely takes place online.7 Although female sex work has recently begun to appear online in Internet forums such as Craigslist.com, male escorts have had access to large and profitable websites devoted to the male sex trade for well over 15 years.8 Unlike escort agencies and other online, two-party transactions such as eBay.com purchases, the websites themselves do not derive any profits from the transactions escorts conduct with clients; they simply allow escorts to post their advertisements and contact information. The websites charge a set fee to escorts for hosting an advertisement and act as a clearinghouse where escorts advertise their services and clients choose between escorts. Consequently, these sites do not screen clients for escorts or vice versa, make no claims or guarantees about the quality of the escorts, and offer no recourse to clients in cases of poor escort performance or fraud.
The large number of male escorts and their ability to price directly without intermediaries create a market setting similar to others that are compatible with competitive market assumptions.9 Competitive markets generally rest on relatively simple criteria: many buyers and sellers, free entry and exit of sellers, the same good or service is sold by all sellers, and buyers and sellers have the same information. Under these conditions we expect markets to function well. Since this market is an illegal market, however, there is a potential for escorts to mislead clients and engage in fraud. In particular, an escort’s ability to post unreliable information and to misrepresent himself should lead to adverse selection in the market. The adverse selection here would be one where fraudulent male escorts would be the predominant actors in the market.
While escort claims are verifiable ex post, there are no formal institutional penalties for ex ante misrepresentation. Similarly, it is unclear how much weight a reputation in an illegal online market carries, and whether any client would respond to claims of high-quality service. Without formal enforcement and with the stakes particularly high (especially for men who are married or not generally assumed to partake in homosexual behavior), it is unclear whether a rich information environment alone can prevent the adverse selection described above. Previous research based on newspaper advertisements for male escorts found no differences in pricing due to information.10 Since the market has moved online, however, there are more service providers and more likely clients than before. The open question is whether the rich information environment offered by the Internet increases opportunities for escorts to disclose information about themselves, which could signal their trustworthiness, and whether the pricing of male escort services is related to this information.
The market for escort services is one of the few instances where illegal behavior is openly advertised. While this is extremely rare for illegal markets, there are reasons why escorts publicly announce their prices for services. First, and somewhat counterintuitively, is that it minimizes the legal risks of sex work. In most police stings for solicitation, the sex worker and the client must agree to both a price and sexual conduct. In order to be prosecuted for prostitution the illegal contract must specify, verbally or otherwise, the terms of the transaction. By posting prices and sexual behaviors online, clients and escorts obviate the need to discuss payment, prices, and sexual behaviors at the same time. In fact, escorts are wary of clients who discuss prices, as this is taken as evidence that they could be police officers.11 In fact, how-to guides for clients and escorts advise both to keep contractual discussions to a minimum:
Understand, though, that they might not be able to fully describe over the phone what they do because they don’t want to get busted … Most escorts will not discuss specific sexual acts for sale. Such is illegal and their services are for time and companionship only. Money is exchanged for time only, the decision to have sex would be a mutual and consensual decision two adults make. Upon meeting the escort, you may be asked certain questions about any possible affiliation with law enforcement.12
Second, escorts compete with one another on these websites. While clients calling a traditional escort agency can be steered to a particular sex worker, clients of male escorts can freely choose between hundreds of options. This is close to the assumption of a market with many sellers. In such a market, clients may be unwilling to engage escorts who do not post their prices or who appear to be less forthcoming about the services they offer, especially if their competitors are forthcoming. Some qualitative interviews with escorts have revealed that escorts post prices as a way to ensure that clients who contact them can afford their services.13
Third, by setting their prices publicly, escorts avoid the time otherwise spent haggling with clients over prices, a staple of street prostitution.14 Escorts assume that any client contacting them knows their price and will pay the posted rate for services, just as any other business owner would expect customers to pay the advertised rate. While the online advertisement sites are clear that money is not exchanged for sex and is only compensation for an escort’s time, the value of that time is not subject to negotiation, either. Despite this publicly posted information about illegal activity, police raids of online male escorts are surprisingly rare.
There are several sources that describe the generic male escort encounter.15 Clients contact escorts directly and arrange for appointments either at the home of the escort (an “incall”) or at the home or hotel of the client (an “outcall”). In the most basic form of an outcall, a client will search escort advertisements and choose an escort. If an appointment is immediately desired, such as the same day, the client will usually phone the escort. Appointments for future dates may be arranged by e-mail, although some escorts prefer to make all appointments by phone. Escorts generally encourage clients to describe the length of the desired appointment and to note any circumstances of which the escort should be aware (e.g., manner of dress required by client and clients who may be disabled). Escort and client then discuss the time and location of the appointment. Once the escort arrives at the location, he meets the client and the two may have a brief discussion to reaffirm the earlier phone conversation. Payment is almost never discussed face-to-face. Money is usually exchanged after the appointment ends, but clients are encouraged to place the money in plain view, such as on a dresser or desk, either before the escort arrives or at the beginning of the appointment.
Interestingly, one reason the street market may be preferred to the online market, from a client perspective, is that misrepresentation would be rare. On the street, a client can see the available sex workers and choose one after negotiation. The problem is that the client can only choose from the escorts available at the time he is looking – he cannot schedule a future meeting nor can he see all of the available sex workers. Itiel (Reference Itiel1998) notes that male escorts and clients have less leeway to informally penalize misrepresentation than street sex workers and their clients. While street sex workers and clients can freely disengage from a transaction for whatever reason by simply walking away, the clandestine nature of an “incall” or “outcall” makes it difficult for either party to escape penalty free if there has been any misrepresentation. For example, once the escort has arrived at the hotel door or home of a client, it may be difficult to induce him to leave without payment of some sort. Also, once the misrepresentation is revealed, the client (and potentially the escort) is already exposed: the escort knows the client’s location, almost certainly some form of contact information, and the client may be open to blackmail and harassment depending on his circumstances. Moreover, clients cannot appeal to an intermediary’s reputation to minimize their exposure. There is no pimp, madam, or escort agency acting as a guarantor. The very nature of the male sex market alters the usual interpretation of the risks involved in sex work. While male escorts are seen as a “safer bet” than male street sex workers, the overall structure in the market is one in which the client is at risk of harm.16
Unlike female sex workers, who are at greater risk of being violated by clients, male sex workers are more prone to violate their clients. Clients are at risk in a number of ways, and the harm from hiring an unsavory escort can have serious consequences. First, escorts may simply rob clients; a traditional scam is to request payment up front and then feign an excuse to leave, never to return. Another common ploy is to steal the client’s wallet in the course of an appointment. In online forums, by far the most frequent complaint from clients is that escorts take payment but do not deliver services.
Second, an escort may blackmail a client or expose his client’s sexual behaviors. As noted earlier, clients and escorts usually communicate by way of telephone or e-mail before the appointment. Most escorts refuse calls from clients who have a “blocked” phone number, and this exposes clients to a risk of blackmail because escorts can trace the client’s phone number. Escorts could threaten to “out” a client, to inform his family of his sexual practices, to contact his employer, or even to contact legal authorities, since the client has solicited prostitution. The case of Ted Haggard (the former president of the National Association of Evangelicals, who became embroiled in a sex scandal involving a male escort in 2006) is one in which the escort kept voicemail messages from the client and later released them to the press. The additional social stigma attached to being exposed as a homosexual, particularly for men who hold positions of power in conservative religious or political organizations, can be career ending.
Several prominent political careers have been damaged by allegations of involvement with male sex workers.17 In addition to the well-publicized national cases, local politicians have also been exposed. In 2003, Utah State Representative Brent Parker (R) resigned when accused of soliciting an undercover police officer. In 2006, Tom Malin lost a Democratic primary bid for the Texas State Legislature when it was revealed that he had formerly been an escort.
Finally, since escorts are relatively young and virile men, physical violence is not uncommon. While escorts usually have someone they will keep abreast of the location and contact information for every appointment in case of an emergency, clients are less likely to let others know of their whereabouts, leaving themselves particularly vulnerable.18 In online forums, clients themselves mention instances in which escorts either attacked them or threatened them with bodily harm. Clients describe being punched, kicked, threatened or attacked with knives, guns, and other deadly weapons. For example, one client noted “The time an escort grabbed me by the throat and slammed me up against wall rifling my pockets for my wallet. Then punched me a couple of times for not bringing my ATM and credit card.”19 Moreover, these crimes are likely to be unreported, since the client would be forced to reveal how he came to know the escort in question.
Unlike the markets for other services, where clients may not choose to pursue legal redress for small matters, clients of male escorts do not have the option of seeking redress for any grievance, regardless of size. While one may be compensated in-kind for poor service at a restaurant, for example, there is no evidence of similar arrangements in the male escort market, even for relatively petty grievances. Escorts are not known to offer compensation or in kind services to dissatisfied clients.
The dangers that clients face increase their incentive to police the market. Without some form of policing, the market would be difficult for clients to navigate. Even with policing by clients, there are limits to how effectively an illegal market can be policed. Even in well-functioning online markets there are fraudulent sellers, and online services spend a great deal of time screening sellers. In the next section, I show exactly how clients informally police the market to minimize the probability that they will hire an unscrupulous escort.
Evidence from the Demand Side of the Male Escort Market
Informal Enforcement in the Male Escort Market
Why would clients be driven to police the market for male escort services? While policing helps the market to function, it comes at a cost to individual clients that benefits not only themselves but also clients who do not police the market. The precise motivations behind client policing are difficult to ascertain. The clients active in policing are providing a service to the market that enhances its ability to operate. It may be due to egalitarian feelings, a desire to protect others, or knowledge that their activities are critical to a market they are eager to be active in.
When a firm discloses information it is inherently making a promise to the consumer. Theoretically, in order for the signals that escorts send to be informative, there must be a reasonable basis for the client to trust the accuracy of the signal.20 Most economic models of signaling assume that signaling is truthful and that misrepresentation does not exist. In these types of models, when an escort signals, his sending a signal acts as a commitment device.21
The key issue when misrepresentation is forbidden is whether to disclose information at all, since the information must be truthful. This issue is pertinent for firms that would expose themselves to significant liability if they were to knowingly mislead consumers. In an illegal market, however, such guarantees cannot be made and informal policing may be the only option. Clients may police the market because they have little choice if they would like to minimize the probability of dealing with a deceptive escort. Since the websites that host advertisements for male escorts derive no income from clients and maximize profits by hosting the largest number of advertisements, they pay little attention to clients’ complaints about deceptive escorts who advertise on the websites. Interestingly, one client framed the situation in the classic used-car reference familiar to most economists:
That site is an advertising site, not an agency. If the used car you buy turns out to be a lemon, do you take it up with the paper that ran the classified ad for it? Could you imagine what managing that he said/he said would be like?
Just as the purchaser of a car advertised in the newspaper does not hold the newspaper responsible for the car being a lemon, clients of escorts cannot hold the website responsible for hosting advertisements of escorts who turn out to be fraudulent, dangerous, or deceptive.22
In this market, clients police escorts in two ways: through posts to independent, client-owned forums and through detailed reviews of escort services on the escort websites, which are linked to the respective escort’s advertisement. The primary functions of client-based forums are information gathering by potential clients and posting of detailed reviews of escort services. In the forums, clients ask other clients for leads to good escorts in an area with which they are not familiar and clients post unsolicited information about escorts.23 This information is available to all interested users. The following exchange is typical. “CLIENT #1: I’ve been drooling over an ad in Chicago who had been listed on XXX as “XXX.” Anybody know more? CLIENT#2 (Response): I can add some information on this guy. I actually can’t remember the name he used, but I do remember the photos. He quoted me $300 and listed himself as a dominant top. He showed up at my hotel on time and when I opened the door I didn’t think his face looked the same as the face pic on the ad. I don’t think the other pics on his current ad are him though. So in a nutshell, buyer beware.”
These forums can be used to highlight a number of dangers regarding escorts. Escorts can create deceptive advertisements on escort websites, use multiple aliases, and even steal from their clients. The forum acts to ensure that these rogue escorts are exposed to clients. The following is an example of such a warning. “[Link to escort advertisement] I hope this link works and I want to let everyone to know to STAY AWAY!!!! He stole $500 from my house and is in partnership with John, Johnny, Joe … [he] also goes by Jake, Michael and many other names … .”
The reviews on the website offer a different type of assessment. The reviews of these escorts act as public goods, much more so than the forums. The reviews describe a specific transaction with an escort. The reviews contain a great deal of information that is free form. The reviews are searchable by city or escort, allowing any client to obtain information about an escort without having to ask.
Additionally, clients can also write reviews of escort services on escort websites. These reviews allow for free form opinions of the escort’s services and are directly linked to, and a product of, the advertisement website. They usually contain a great deal of information about the escort and his behavior during a particular appointment – clients give information on how the appointment was made, specific information regarding the escort during the appointment, such as escort hygiene, physical appearance, conversational ability, the escort’s manner of dress, sexual activities provided, and the price charged. While the escort websites do give escorts the option of allowing themselves to be reviewed by clients (nearly 95 percent in the data allow it), escorts have no control over the reviews and all reviews are posted if the escort allows reviews. This all-or-nothing nature of reviews is a key advantage of these reputation measures, in that escorts have no control over their reviews: all reviews for the escort are retained on the website, not a selected sample posted or chosen by the escort.
The market policing by clients allows for the stock of information to be large: clients who would never meet exchange information about escorts, and clients who never review escorts can access a large amount of information about escorts. While the cost per client to share information is relatively high, given the amount of time it would take to write a detailed review, the returns to the accumulated knowledge are also high. These policing measures also allow disclosure to be credible. Theoretically, the policing and reviews raise the cost of deception for the untrustworthy escort, creating a wedge where the honest escort can credibly signal and receive a premium for doing so. A deceptive escort would need to create a totally new advertisement with new pictures and new contact information to continue to operate in the market once he had been discovered as being deceptive. These new identities are not without cost. This means the cost of being a deceptive escort is greater than that of being a truthful escort. This cost differential is a necessary condition for signaling to be informative – and the cost differential could only exist if clients police the market.
Identifying the Signal
Due to the inherent dangers in male sex work and the unique situation where male sex workers have to provide information to their clients with regard to their honesty and safety, the information flow is from escorts to clients. Clients choose escorts from many available options, and clients reveal that they choose escorts based on both physical characteristics and cues as to who will not pose a threat to their security and privacy. High-quality escorts will show up on time, match their advertised description, provide the agreed upon services at the advertised price, be discreet, and generally act in a manner respectful of the client’s privacy and safety.
What information do clients consider when they hire a male escort? What type of information is more likely to be observed, given a particular type? Using the same client-based forums that serve as policing, I identify the types of information that escorts and clients take as important in male escort advertisements. Clients reveal that they pay particular attention to the presence of face pictures (ideally multiple face pictures) in an escort’s advertisement as a signal of truthfulness. Clients explicitly and implicitly note that face pictures are more likely to be observed when the escort is high quality.
I’ve been tempted [to hire an escort with no face pictures] but have always ended up feeling let down by anyone without a face-shot so I’ve stayed away.
As far as pics that are probably not real, same deal, do not hire. No one has just a professional modeling pic or two and no other pics. They need to have more than one face pic in their ads.
Even in their advertisements, escorts note that face pictures are what clients take into account. Escorts agree that face pictures transmit information about quality in their advertisements to clients and in their advice to other escorts.
Don’t get fooled by escorts using headless picture, they are often fake! Choose the certified one! A real man!
Indeed, escorts who do not have face pictures in their advertisements apologize for the lack of them.
Good looking all-American … clean-cut type … Sorry no face pic but you won’t be disappointed!!
The qualitative evidence suggests that escorts and clients treat face pictures as particularly valuable information and a signal that the escort is unlikely to misrepresent himself.
There are several reasons why face pictures would be a signal of quality. Face pictures give a key measure of immediate representativeness: upon meeting the escort, the client would know whether the escort was “as advertised.” This would allow a client to minimize any potential losses, since misrepresentation would be obvious. Escorts who do show their face convey that they have less to hide. They are willing to be publicly identified, making it less likely they will violate the client or expose him to blackmail or harassment, since they could be readily recognized by third parties. Posting a face picture is similar to posting a bond – it decreases the probability that an escort would misrepresent himself, and therefore act as advertisements for quality.24 Showing face pictures not only acts as a signal of quality, but could also be interpreted by clients as commitment device (a special case of disclosure). A deceptive escort, once discovered, cannot costlessly reinvent himself. Also, clients can use face pictures as a search characteristic when looking for male escort services. Escorts who do not show their faces may not want to be identified because of their occupation and/or because they are not high quality. Not signaling is one way of ensuring anonymity, which makes it easier to deceive clients.
Conceptual and Empirical Framework
The key issue is whether or not there is a response by the clients to the signal. There are two possibilities: either the market responds to the signal offered by escorts or it does not. Theoretically, this would be a separating or pooled equilibrium. In the pooled equilibrium, the signal does not lead to wage differences – all escorts would be paid the same, whether they signal or not. In the separating equilibrium, there is separation between types, where the signalers receive a higher wage than non-signalers. In this case the signal is informative as it leads clients to believe that the escort is more likely to be a high-quality escort.
In an illegal market such as male sex work, it is difficult to specify which equilibrium would hold. Most signaling models implicitly assume that some type of formal enforcement or institution guarantees truthful disclosure. For example, in the simplest version of the classic signaling model in Spence (Reference Spence1973), workers obtain otherwise useless education to signal their ability to employers. If schools could not certify that an agent had actually obtained the years of schooling she claimed (for example, by printing fraudulent degrees or transcripts), anyone could act as if they had the highest level of education possible. Such fraud would obviously decrease the value of the signal and, in the extreme, the signal would have no value.
There are several reasons we might expect a pooled equilibrium for male sex work. First, the degree of uncertainty could be large, which can cause clients to react to signals weakly, if at all. The information being provided comes from websites advertising sex work services, after all. Second, the cost differential for signaling by type may be particularly small in this market. Although clients act to police the market, this may not result in a substantial cost differential between those that would signal and those that would not. If deceptive escorts could easily produce fake face pictures, clients would have no ability to discern quality from the signal itself. Any client without direct experience with a given escort would be fundamentally uninformed (or less than fully informed) as to the escort’s true quality, since deception is a distinct possibility. Since the cost of signaling against type for the deceptive escort may not be much higher than that of the genuinely high-quality escort, it is difficult to argue on theoretical grounds that clients would trust the veracity of the signal.25 By the same token, it is not clear that reputation would solve the problem, since those describing the reputation of the escort may have ulterior motives. For example, positive reviews may be left by the escort or his associates, and negative reviews by competitors.
I therefore test for whether information – in particular, the signal of face pictures – leads to wage difference (separation) in this market. If there is separation, then the market partially overcomes the problem of asymmetric information. Most important, it would do so without formal enforcement.26 While, theoretically, the question is whether or not the signal has value, an additional empirical question looks at how much value the signal has relative to the value of a signal in a market where formal enforcement is present – whether legal and illegal markets value information to the same degree.
The key empirical question is the value of the signal. The task is to test whether the expected value (average price, w) of male sex workers who use face pictures, the signal (s) identified earlier, is greater than the average price of those who do not, holding other escort characteristics (x) constant
Following empirical studies of information in markets, I use a regression of the escort’s price (which is also the wage he earns for his services) on the information he provides in his advertisement. I take the usual interpretation that the coefficients reflect a consumer’s willingness to pay for each characteristic, and therefore reflect the characteristic’s value. While there have been criticisms of this interpretation due to restrictive assumptions, Bajari and Benkard (Reference Bajari and Benkard2005) show that the interpretation holds and that the price function is identified under very general conditions that apply to this case.27 If the market separates based on the signal identified, then face pictures will have value in terms of escort prices. I therefore regress the escort’s hourly price on the signal in the advertisements (Signal), reputation and reviews (R), personal characteristics (Z), and identifiers for location/market (X).28
In contrast to other studies that analyze the total amount of information in the market, I disaggregate the information in order to estimate the value of particular types of information. While pictures may have value, pictures were not the signal that clients looked for from escorts. I therefore estimate the value of pictures in general and specific types of pictures, namely face pictures. Based on the institutional analysis presented earlier, I hypothesize that face pictures are the key type of information that leads to separation in the market for male sex work, which is a clue to see whether this market functions well by overcoming the problems of asymmetric information. If the market takes face pictures as a signal of escort quality, we would expect γ to be positive. If not, then participants do not respond to the signal either because it is not believed or because it is a noisy signal of quality to which market prices do not respond.
Data from the Online Male Escort Market
Since the issue is type of picture listed, I recorded not only the number of pictures, but also the type of pictures in each advertisement. In particular, I look at three categories of pictures – pictures that show an escort’s face in a distinguishable way (which may or may not include nudity), pictures that show a nude body only (either from the front or the back, but with no face shown), and pictures that show neither nudity nor an escort’s face (pictures of torsos, biceps, legs, feet, etc.). While nudity is allowed, escorts may not post pictures that display sex acts and may not display pictures that include persons other than the escort. Uploaded pictures are placed in an online holding tank until cleared by the website’s management. Every advertisement must be accompanied by at least one picture.
Table 2.1 shows the summary statistics for the escorts in the data. In terms of information, escorts post an average of six pictures in their advertisements and have three survey reviews, and one escort in three has a text review. Two-thirds of escorts post at least one face picture and, on average, escorts post three pictures containing their face and two containing their nude body with no face shown. There are some differences when looking at the summary statistics for escorts sorted by whether they post face pictures. For example, the average escort who shows pictures of his face posts nearly seven pictures, four of which are of his face. The average escort who does not show pictures of his face posts five pictures, three of which are of his nude body. Escorts who post face pictures charge approximately $230 an hour, while escorts who do not post face picture charge approximately $190 an hour. Below, I check to see if these differences in prices hold after controlling for various individual, reputation, and geographic differences that have the potential to explain the price difference between sex workers who post face pictures and those who do not.
Table 2.1 Summary statistics for the escort sample
| Variable | Whole sample | No face pictures | Face pictures | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mean | Std. dev. | Mean | Std. dev. | Mean | Std. dev. | |
| Price | 216.88 | 64.46 | 187.09 | 64.54 | 231.59 | 59.15 |
| Log of price | 5.34 | 0.29 | 5.18 | 0.31 | 5.41 | 0.25 |
| Spot price | 217.86 | 64.49 | 188.52 | 64.52 | 232.30 | 59.40 |
| Number of pictures | 6.14 | 2.84 | 5.17 | 2.81 | 6.61 | 2.73 |
| Body-only pictures | 2.08 | 2.07 | 3.16 | 2.39 | 1.55 | 1.66 |
| Face pictures | 2.90 | 2.96 | 0.00 | 0.00 | 4.32 | 2.63 |
| Survey reviews | 3.18 | 6.72 | 3.25 | 7.43 | 3.15 | 6.34 |
| Text reviews | 0.35 | 1.03 | 0.36 | 1.16 | 0.35 | 0.96 |
| Fraction Good Survey | 0.88 | 0.27 | 0.86 | 0.31 | 0.89 | 0.25 |
| Fraction Good Text | 0.88 | 0.30 | 0.89 | 0.29 | 0.87 | 0.31 |
Notes:
Fraction Good Survey and Fraction Good Text are defined over escorts with survey or text reviews, respectively.
Price is the outcall price posted by an escort in his advertisement.
If an escort has both a spot price and a posted price, or no posted price and a spot price, the spot price replaces the posted price.
Face Value
Figure 2.1 reports the results from various ordinary least squares (OLS) regression specifications, where I regress the escort’s log hourly price on the number of pictures and a large number of controls such as escort characteristics and location.29 This is a naïve specification, since it treats all pictures equally and considers only the quantity of pictures. The first estimate shows that the number of pictures in an escort’s advertisement is strongly related to the escort’s price, controlling for individual characteristics and market location. Each additional picture increases an escort’s price by 1.7 percent. The magnitude of the premium for pictures is close to the premium noted by Lewis (Reference Lewis2009) for used cars on eBay.com (which is between 1.66 and 1.82 percent), one of the few estimates for the value of information in legal markets. I find that information has value in this illegal market just as it does in legal markets where enforcement is formal.30
Figure 2.1 The value of pictures in escort advertisements
The second estimate is the value of pictures when I add the more coarse measure of reputation: survey reviews. By themselves, survey reviews do not exert a significant effect on prices, but the effect of pictures on prices remains the same even when this measure of quality is included. Recall that these reviews were just star ratings of escorts and asked a simple set of questions about performance. They did not reference a specific transaction nor do they allow clients to offer further details. For the third estimate, I add the more detailed and informative measure of reputation: free form text reviews. Text reviews are strongly and positively related to prices, but the effect is quite small, less than one-half of one percent. Consistent with other results in the literature, reputation affects prices in the male escort market.31
Figure 2.2 shows a set of results for a different specification, where the number of pictures is included as well as a dichotomous measure for the presence of face pictures in an advertisement. The institutional evidence presented earlier suggests that face pictures are the key measure of truthfulness in the market, and we therefore expect their presence to be positively related to escort prices if they are a signal of quality. The effect of face pictures on prices is quite large. Escorts who post pictures of their faces have prices that are more than 20 percent higher than those that do not, even after controlling for both measures of reputation and a host of individual escort and market characteristics.32 Additionally, including a measure of whether face pictures are present significantly reduces the relationship between total pictures and the escort’s price – the coefficient on number of pictures is reduced by more than 50 percent once the indicator for face pictures is included (see Figure 2.1). I also include a dichotomous measure of having a nude body picture with no face shown. The effect of having nude, headless photos actually reduces the price by more than 5 percent. If an escort sees an average of twenty clients per month, the difference would amount to roughly $10,000 per year in additional earnings for the escorts who post face pictures.
Figure 2.2 The premium of picture types
While Figure 2.2 examines the role of information at the extensive margin, Figure 2.3 presents the results from the preferred specifications, in which I use the number of face and body pictures in the specification. I investigate the premium to each additional face picture and body picture to see how much of the total premium to pictures in Figure 2.1 can be attributed to each type of picture an escort will display.
Figure 2.3 The premium of face pictures
In Figure 2.3 I use the number of face and body-only pictures as the measures of information. This specification is similar to the naïve specification for all pictures, where now I can estimate, directly, the value of face pictures. The first estimate shows that the premium to each face picture is large – each additional face picture increases the price charged by an escort by roughly 3 percent, nearly twice the premium of total pictures reported earlier. Put another way, one standard deviation in the number of face pictures increases escort prices by 0.3 of standard deviations, a large effect on prices for sex workers. In the second estimate I add body-only pictures and find that they are not significantly related to prices. For the third and fourth estimates I add the two measures of reputation and find that they behave similarly to the results in Figure 2.1, where survey reviews are not related to prices and where text reviews are strongly related to escort prices. Finally, I control for a host of escort- and market-specific characteristics and the result holds – the premium to face pictures is much larger than the premium to pictures overall, and body-only pictures are not significantly related to prices.
In Figure 2.3 the results come from a specification where I allow picture types to enter directly, but this can be problematic since escorts who convey different information may also use different numbers of pictures. As the summary results (Table 2.1) showed, escorts who post face pictures also post more pictures overall. To see if this drives the relationship between prices and face pictures, in Figure 2.4 I report the results where I use a specification that controls for the total number of pictures in an advertisement to focus on the composition of the information, the fraction of pictures that are face pictures, rather than the quantity of information. To ease interpretation, the results are presented in terms of the premium for a 10 percent increase in the fraction of face pictures in an escort’s advertisement, such as having three of ten pictures being face pictures as opposed to two of ten pictures being face pictures. For the first estimate I include only the number of pictures and the share of pictures that are face pictures. Consistent with the results in Figure 2.3, the fraction of face pictures is strongly related to escort prices. One standard deviation in the fraction of face pictures increases escort prices by 0.12 of a standard deviation. I then add the fraction of pictures that are body-only pictures and find that they are negatively related to prices, but their effect on prices (in absolute value) is much smaller than the effect of face pictures. As earlier, I then add measures of reputation, and the effect of a larger fraction of pictures being face pictures is still positive and of similar size to the most basic results.33 (The inclusion of the additional reputation measures does lessen the magnitude of the effect of body-only pictures, and they cease to be statistically significant.34) The effect of face pictures is robust to the inclusion of reputational measures, which suggests that face pictures are a different signal of quality and not a direct substitute for the information contained in reviews.
Figure 2.4 The premium for the fraction of pictures that are face pictures
Taken together, Figures 2.1–2.4 establish that information and reputation are important in the market for male sex work and that each is priced in a different manner. While the amount of information matters (each picture increases prices by roughly 1.5 percent), the quality of the information matters more (each face picture increases prices by 3 percent). In fact, the entire premium to information in the market is driven by face pictures.35 Also, reputation matters in the market, but only in the form of free form text reviews, which contain more information about an escort’s quality and behavior than do survey reviews. This implies that the information regarding reputation also varies depending upon how it is delivered.
What, exactly, do face pictures and the text reviews signal? While they both appear to signal quality, it is likely that they each signal a different component of quality. The first and most important would be “basic quality.” Basic quality includes the escort’s truthfulness and the client’s safety, and is the most fundamental aspect of quality. Escorts who are high in basic quality will show up on time, match their advertised description, provide the agreed upon services at the advertised price, be discreet, and generally act in a manner respectful of the client’s privacy and safety. This is the type of quality likely signaled with face pictures. A second aspect of quality is something I define as skill at providing services, or “service quality.” Service quality refers to how well the escort performs services relative to others. Given that the two types of quality are different and serve different functions, it is not surprising that they have similar (but empirically distinct) effects on prices.
The results support the idea that the information environment afforded by the Internet allows male sex workers to signal their type successfully via face pictures and receive a premium for doing so. It also supports the hypothesis that face pictures are a specific signal of quality in this market. The results also support the idea that reputations are best established with evidence of the type of experience clients could expect from an escort. More importantly, the results suggest that the value of information conveyed in an illegal market is similar to the value of information provided in a legal market.
Ruling Out Alternative Explanations for the Value of Face Pictures
The previous section presented evidence in support the interpretation of face pictures as a signal of basic quality. However, that interpretation is subject to several criticisms, given the cross-sectional nature of the data. First, though the price responds positively to the presence of face pictures, the value of face pictures should be finite – if every face picture increased prices that would be implausible. Below I show that the marginal value of face pictures decreases as a function of the number of face pictures. This is what we would expect – while showing the first few face pictures is a signal of basic quality, sending several would not increase the signal itself. Second, it is possible that clients respond to empty signals of quality. In other words, price differences do not reflect signaling as much as a client’s wishful belief that face pictures convey credibility. I explore this possibility below and find it to be inconsistent with the evidence. Third, the results could be driven by a beauty premium as opposed to a signal of quality. Naturally, physical attractiveness would be related to prices and would be displayed via face pictures. I provide suggestive evidence that beauty is not the driving force behind the face picture premium. Lastly, I construct a counterfactual and show that where client policing is stymied, the value of the signal decreases substantially. This is confirmatory evidence that information only has value when the signal is rendered credible by client policing.
Marginal Face Value
Since the interpretation of the price effect of face pictures hinges on face pictures being a signal of quality, it is critical to estimate the marginal value of face pictures. The marginal value of face pictures should be a decreasing function of the number of face pictures. Once a threshold of credibility is attained, additional pictures should not convey additional quality. If this were not so, escorts could be rewarded for infinite numbers of face pictures. This would imply that the signal had infinitely positive value, and that would certainly be difficult to justify if the signal is one of basic quality. In the review of client forums, clients note that they look for multiple pictures of an escort’s face, but there should be a limit to their value after some reasonable number of pictures establishes that the escort in question is not deceptive.
To estimate the marginal value of face pictures, I estimate a polynomial function of the value of face pictures.36 I plot the marginal value as a function of the number of face pictures in Figure 2.5. As the figure shows, the marginal value of face pictures decreases sharply, approaching zero at the seventh picture. These marginal values are consistent with the interpretation of the results for face pictures being a signal of basic quality. The average value of face pictures is large, but the marginal value of the eighth additional face picture is indistinguishable from zero. While the signal has value, excessive signaling is not rewarded in this market.37
Figure 2.5 The marginal value of face pictures
True Quality
It could be that clients are responding to empty signals of quality. Uninformed clients could certainly be duped into believing claims that are not supported. Jin and Kato (Reference Jin and Kato2006), for example, conducted an experiment on eBay.com auctions for baseball cards and found that while advertised quality was positively related to price, actual quality was not. They conclude that sellers in online markets target uninformed buyers, and that eBay.com’s system of universal ratings and anonymous identities allows this situation to persist. In essence, clients could respond to signals that turn out not to truly be signals related to quality. Lewis (Reference Lewis2009) contends that Jin and Kato’s result may be due to the fact that the stakes are relatively low in the auctions that they study, where the baseball cards in question are not very expensive. It is certainly true that the stakes for misrepresentation are high in the market for male sex work, both in dollar value and the potential negative outcomes from misrepresentation. Furthermore, while buyers in online markets such as eBay.com have some form of formal protection from fraud, the clients of a male escort do not have any formal or implied guarantees against fraud: it is not possible for them to be lulled into a false sense of security by an escort’s guarantee. The active policing documented earlier shows that clients are not easily or consistently fooled. As such, while some portion of these results could be explained by the presence of uninformed consumers who are targeted by escorts who use fraudulent face pictures, that portion is likely to be small. Also, nearly every escort advertises that he is of the best quality. Certainly, no escort claims to provide average or mediocre services. While the signal of quality is not used by every escort, claims of quality are made by every escort.
Beauty
One concern with the interpretation of the results is that the face picture premium could be due to a beauty premium and not signaling. Many papers document the premium to beauty in the labor market, and it would be reasonable to conjecture that the premium may be even higher among sex workers.38 In this sample of sex workers it could certainly be the case that more attractive escorts are more likely to display pictures of their faces and, conditional on displaying any face picture, display more face pictures. It is doubtful, however, that all attractive escorts show their faces since men may not want long-lived evidence of their careers in commercial sex on the Internet.39
I tackle the issue of beauty directly by obtaining beauty measures for the escorts in the data. I first address the issue that more attractive sex workers may display more face pictures, conditional on displaying any picture. I then discuss the potential selection issue that more-attractive sex workers might be more likely to display face pictures in general. To do so the beauty of the male escorts was rated independently by a group of men. Beauty was scored from 1 to 5, with 1 being the least attractive, and 5 being the most attractive. These types of rating systems are standard for measures of physical attractiveness. Both openly gay and closeted men were requested to serve as enumerators, since heterosexually identified men likely make up a non-negligible portion of the client base.40 Nearly 90 percent of the escorts who show their face pictures in the data were given beauty scores; the mean beauty score is 3 and the standard deviation 1.2.41
In Figure 2.6 I present results of the value of face pictures where I also include estimates of escort beauty. Since subjective ratings of beauty and other personal characteristics may differ across enumerators, giving rise to a spurious correlation, the estimates include enumerator-fixed effects in all specifications. The first bar shows the estimate of the premium to face pictures for comparison, but in this instance only includes the escorts for whom I have beauty scores.42 Conditional on posting face pictures, the premium for each additional face picture is 1.5 percent, which is similar to the previous estimates. In the second estimate I include the measure of beauty, and find that while positively correlated with log hourly price, the coefficient is not statistically significant and the effect on the value of face pictures is nonexistent. The main face picture result remains statistically significant and has a magnitude of 1.5 percent. Therefore, even after controlling for escort beauty, the main result remains consistent and statistically significant. I then include all the various control measures, such as race, height, weight, body type, and eye color, and the beauty coefficient, though smaller and still positive, is not statistically significant, and the inclusion of beauty and these individual measures (which could be correlated with beauty) does not significantly change the face picture premium.
Figure 2.6 The premium to face pictures when beauty is also measured
Perhaps it is not beauty differences between a “2” and a “5” that matter, however. It could be a case of simply being or not being attractive. The next estimate in Figure 2.6 explores whether returns to beauty may be nonlinear by including a dichotomous indicator for above-average beauty (beauty score equals 4 or 5) and below-average beauty (beauty score equals 1 or 2). Again, neither of the beauty measures is statistically significant, although the point estimates show that above-average beauty is rewarded and below-average beauty is not. Last, I include the above- and below-average beauty measures along with the various control measures for escort characteristics. Even with all of these controls, the face premium coefficient is still 1.5 percent and statistically significant. It appears that the inclusion of beauty and face pictures has no significant effect on the relationship between face pictures and escort prices.
This relative lack of a relationship between escort beauty and prices is consistent with the literature on the variety of beauty standards in gay and heterosexual communities. For example, Carpenter (Reference Carpenter2003) has shown differential partnership and attractiveness patterns between gay men and heterosexuals by measures of physical well-being such as body mass index (BMI). Also, there could be premiums in the market for men who would otherwise be considered unattractive if they had other attributes that were valued by the market, such as expertise in specific sexual conduct.43 Overall, the results show that the beauty premium in the market is small – part of this, however, could be due to the fact that the online market involves some self-selection into online male sex work.
Recall that the results in Figure 2.6 show estimates of the effect of face pictures on prices for the men who show their faces in their advertisements. Therefore, there might be selection by beauty into posting – i.e., more beautiful men might be more likely to post face pictures. Ultimately, I cannot rule out this explanation definitively, but I can use the results of Figure 2.6, and the other coefficients in the specifications, to roughly calculate how much beauty could explain the difference between men who do and do not show their face pictures. To estimate the maximum of the proportion of the results that could be due to beauty, assume that all men who do not post their face picture are rated a beauty that is strictly less than the lowest rated beauty (that men who do not show their faces have a beauty rating of, say, zero, where the lowest beauty rating allowed is one) and that men who do post their faces are rated as the highest beauty score (every man who shows a face picture is a “5”). Even under this implausible assumption, the differences in the beauty premium between the two groups (4.5 percent) could explain, at best, less than one-quarter of the face picture premium (which is 20 percent). Put another way, even the least attractive man is still much better off showing a picture of his face than not, as the “no picture” penalty is more than four times as large as the “unattractive” penalty. This implies that beauty can explain, at best, a small fraction of the estimated face picture premium.
In the data there are also the physical characteristics of the escorts. If more beautiful escorts select into providing face pictures and have different physical characteristics, then a comparison of the distribution of characteristics of escorts who do and do not show face pictures would reveal such differences. Overall, the results show that along nearly every dimension of physical characteristics, the escorts who provide face pictures are statistically similar to those who do not. Out of more than twenty physical characteristics (e.g., hair color, eye color, body type), there are only three instances where escorts who show their face pictures are significantly different from those that do not: escorts who show their face pictures are more likely to be blond (14 percent versus 10 percent) and have an “athletic/swimmer’s” build (50 percent versus 42 percent); escorts who do not show their faces are more likely to be muscular, however (34 percent versus 28 percent).44
This issue is also addressed indirectly by considering second-order implications of the interpretation of the face picture premium. Consider that text reviews reveal information about the quality of the escort, but not the escort’s beauty. If the premium to face pictures is due to beauty, then the interaction of face pictures with text reviews should be positive: beauty would be a complement to quality as described in the text reviews. If face pictures are a measure of quality, however, the interaction of face pictures and text reviews should be negative, as face pictures are substitutes for client descriptions of quality. In essence, this is a test of how the interaction of basic quality and service quality operate. The two should have a negative interaction if face pictures are indeed a signal of quality – but a positive interaction if face pictures are about beauty as opposed to quality. When I include the interaction of face pictures and text reviews in the specification, the interaction is negative in both instances (−0.009 [0.004] and −0.028 [0.031] for number and fraction, respectively). The results do not change when I interact the number or fraction of face pictures with the number of positive text reviews (−0.004 [0.002], −0.009 [0.013] for number and fraction, respectively). I take this as suggestive evidence that face pictures convey similar information about quality text reviews, and therefore are substitutes for quality measures.
If face pictures only conveyed beauty, then the marginal value of additional face pictures would be zero. Otherwise, additional pictures would have value, although, as I argued earlier, that value would decrease with the number of pictures as credibility is established. The results indicate that, on average, additional face pictures come with a 1.5 percent price premium, similar to the estimate in Figure 2.6. The premium I find applies to additional face pictures – two escorts of the same beauty would be paid differently if one supplied one face picture and the other supplied five. This is more consistent with the notion that face pictures establish quality rather than beauty, which can be ascertained from a single picture. Given the evidence presented above, I believe it is unlikely that the majority of the face picture premium is driven by beauty, although this cannot be established conclusively.
A Counterfactual – Signaling without Informal Enforcement
A key to the interpretation of face pictures as a signal of quality is the belief that informal policing by clients causes the signal that escorts send to be credible. Without the informal enforcement, the value of the signal would certainly be suspect. Additionally, informal policing would have little effect on beauty premiums or true quality in the market, since policing would not be related to escort beauty itself or the claims that escorts make about the quality of their services. Unfortunately, the value of informal enforcement is difficult to test directly. The data does give us one unique instance where I can observe the value of the signal when informal enforcement is lacking. As noted earlier, in the advertisement data escorts can choose whether or not they will allow themselves to be reviewed on the website. Disallowing reviews is all-or-nothing: escorts do not have the option of deleting or selectively posting reviews of either type. An escort who disallows reviews cannot establish a reputation in the data source. The vast majority of escorts (nearly 95 percent) allow themselves to be reviewed. In general the issue is moot since there is little variation.45 There is one exception: the escorts in Las Vegas allow themselves to be reviewed only 40 percent of the time. Las Vegas is unique – there is no other city where fewer than 90 percent of the escorts disallow reviews. Of all escorts who disallow reviews, more than 35 percent are located in Las Vegas. It is doubtful that this is a state effect, since escorts in other Nevada cities allow reviews more than 90 percent of the time. While the exact cause of this curiosity is unknown,46 I am able to test for the value of the signal in a location with little client policing. As described earlier, client policing allows signaling to be credible, so without client policing, the value of the signal should be negligible.
For comparison, Table 2.2 shows summary statistics for escorts based in Las Vegas and escorts based in five other randomly selected cities with similar numbers of escorts. As the table shows, the cities are all similar in terms of rates and escort attributes such as height and weight. Similarly, escorts in Las Vegas post the same average number of face pictures as those in other cities. In general, the Las Vegas market looks similar to the other markets shown in Table 2.2 and to the overall market, except for the fact that only 40 percent of Las Vegas escorts allow reviews.
Table 2.2 Escort characteristics for selected cities
| Summary statistics by city | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Las Vegas | Chicago | Atlanta | Houston | Dallas | Boston | |
| Observations | 65 | 78 | 76 | 65 | 92 | 54 |
| Review allowed? | 0.40 | 0.96 | 0.93 | 0.98 | 0.95 | 0.96 |
| (0.49) | (0.20) | (0.26) | (0.12) | (0.22) | (0.19) | |
| Price | 227.36 | 231.79 | 232.74 | 209.9 | 207.12 | 232.13 |
| (66.95) | (57.20) | (86.38) | (57.93) | (62.65) | (51.74) | |
| No. of pictures | 6.44 | 6.38 | 6.52 | 6.18 | 6.46 | 6.24 |
| (2.75) | (2.57) | (2.82) | (2.69) | (2.77) | (2.97) | |
| No. of face pictures | 2.80 | 2.73 | 3.43 | 2.41 | 2.15 | 2.79 |
| (2.81) | (2.77) | (3.04) | (3.09) | (2.52) | (3.42) | |
| Age (years) | 28.75 | 27.48 | 27.33 | 26.35 | 29.31 | 26.7 |
| (6.97) | (6.02) | (6.19) | (6.29) | (6.91) | (5.88) | |
| Height (inches) | 70.88 | 70.62 | 70.56 | 70.06 | 70.44 | 69.76 |
| (2.70) | (2.95) | (2.59) | (2.49) | (2.67) | (2.80) | |
| Weight (pounds) | 172.23 | 166.59 | 166.46 | 168.02 | 169.41 | 165.43 |
| (25.02) | (30.16) | (21.77) | (23.48) | (24.47) | (31.31) | |
Standard deviations in parentheses.
In Figure 2.7 I show estimates for the value of face pictures, where I replicate the regressions presented earlier for each city separately. In every other city I find a large and significant premium to face pictures that matches the population estimates discussed earlier. Both the dichotomous and continuous measures of face pictures yield estimates close to the overall values for each city – except Las Vegas.
Figure 2.7 The face picture premium by city
While the value of signaling is reasonably stable across markets, the results for Las Vegas are striking. In the Las Vegas market there is no premium to posting face pictures in an advertisement. This is not merely an artifact of statistical significance, the point estimates for the value of face pictures in Las Vegas (−0.09 for the dichotomous measure, 0.007 for the continuous measure) are much lower than for every other city in Figure 2.7. In the one location where client policing is stymied by escorts who do not allow client reviews, the credibility of the signal is in doubt and market prices do not respond to the signal. There appear to be spillovers, as well – even among escorts who allow reviews in Las Vegas, the value of face pictures is not statistically significant.47 This result conforms to the interpretation of the premium to face pictures in the market. It would be cavalier, however, to suggest that these results for Las Vegas are definitive. Since there is no other location in the data with the same information differences, it is not possible to distinguish this effect from a location effect. While there is evidence that clients are aware of the increased probability of encountering low-quality escorts, it is unclear whether the escorts in Las Vegas are aware of the low value of information in their market. These results are inconsistent with either a beauty or true quality interpretation, unless one is willing to argue that escorts in Las Vegas are markedly less attractive than other escorts or are of uniformly different quality than escorts in other cities.
Robustness
Prices
Thus far, all of the prices used are the prices in an escort’s advertisement. Though the qualitative evidence suggests that the prices posted are the prices paid, it could be that escorts are more willing to price discriminate once they are alone with clients. If this is the case, the empirical strategy will yield biased estimates of the value of the signal. Fortunately, I have spot prices, specific transaction prices recorded by clients from the most recent text reviews of escorts, which I can compare to the prices that escorts post in their advertisements. Additionally, there are a small number of escorts who do not post their price, but have a spot price. As these are prices actually paid by clients in specific appointments, I can check the results with these prices.
Spot prices are well correlated with posted prices (the correlation is 0.89). Even so, I check the results with spot prices in two ways. First, I replace existing prices with spot prices where available. These results are reported in Figure 2.8. Even when actual prices paid replace advertised prices, this does not alter the results. As a more stringent test, I use only spot prices. Using only spot prices as the dependent variable reduces the size of the sample, but I still find that each face picture yields a premium of nearly 1.5 percent. The premium to each face picture is slightly smaller and may be due to the fact that the variation in the number of face pictures is much smaller for men with text reviews.
Figure 2.8 The face picture premium for selected types of escorts
Another potential concern with the results is that they could be driven jointly by reputation and information. Although I have included measures of reputation in all of the specifications, it could be that men supply higher-quality information once their reputation is established, rather than the reverse. If the market is dominated by clients returning to the same escorts with whom they have had a good first encounter, that will drive the results.
I test for this reverse determination by looking at escorts who have no reputation to speak of; they have neither survey reviews nor text reviews. These could be new escorts in the market or old escorts who are abandoning an older profile. On the one hand, escorts with no reputation are unknown and could be more likely to signal against type. On the other hand, the only information a client can use to determine the quality of these escorts is the information conveyed in their advertisement, so the signal may be particularly valuable for these escorts. In either case, those with no reputation can only disclose their type through the information in their advertisement – they have no reputation to exploit.
In Figure 2.8 I show the value of face pictures from the same type of regression for all escorts, where I regress price on the usual set of covariates for escorts with no reputation. The results show that face pictures matter more for escorts with no reputation. The premium to the presence of face pictures is more than 3 percent. This premium is slightly higher than the premium estimated for escorts overall. Therefore, it seems that when escorts do not have an established reputation, signaling may be even more important.
Selection
Escorts do not have to post their prices in their advertisements, although well over 85 percent of the men in the data do. For example, an escort can list that he provides a given service (incall or outcall), but may not post the price for that service. The results could overstate the effects of information if there is selection into posting prices that varies with the information content of the advertisement, which could lead to selection in either direction. It could be that escorts who post more pictures or more face pictures are more likely to post their prices since they have signaled their quality.
These types of arguments could be extended to the reservation wages of escorts who do or do not provide a certain set of information to the market, which itself could alter the estimate of the returns to signaling quality in the market. To test whether the number or type of pictures has any impact on the decision to post prices, I estimated a model where the outcome is whether the escort posts prices. If there is a difference in the likelihood of posting prices based on the presence of face pictures then this would need to be taken into account. The results of these regressions show that the number of pictures, the presence of face and body pictures, and the number of face and body pictures do not significantly predict the decision to post prices or not. This holds when I consider a number of alternative specifications and when I include or exclude additional controls. I take this as evidence that the decision to post prices is not influenced by the other information in the advertisement itself.
Conclusion
Male sex workers are unique in illegal markets: they price independently and without intermediaries, they use a rich information environment to solicit clients, and their large number creates a competitive setting where we expect markets to function as if the assumptions of neoclassical economic theory held. Unfortunately, two of those assumptions are that the underlying transaction is legal and that buyers and sellers have similar information. Since formal institutional enforcement is nonexistent, the market could be plagued with adverse selection. Before moving to more systematic analysis of the market, it is important to establish that this market functions well and reacts to information in a manner that suggests that it gets prices right. The illegal nature of online male sex work makes it theoretically unlikely that this market would be well functioning, however. Unlike street sex work, online sex work does not involve a face-to-face negotiation where reputations and personal interactions allow the market to work. Buyers are, in essence, purchasing on faith. This faith would be in short supply if all that clients had to go on were the “word” of a sex worker with whom they had never dealt with. To overcome this problem, buyers have developed a unique solution where they require a specific type of information, face pictures, from male sex workers, which they interpret as a signal of escort trustworthiness.
I find that escorts do convey a great deal of information through their advertisements and that the market rewards this information. Empirically, the reward to face pictures is substantial; it is the driving force behind the premium to information in this market. Not only do I find a sizable information premium in this market, but the magnitude is similar to the premium seen in legal markets. Sex workers who signal their credibility via face pictures earn roughly $10,000 more per year than those who do not. Overall, the result is consistent with a market that functions well despite its illegal nature.
It is important to note some caveats to these results. First, although it would be tempting to argue that the results show that informal institutions such as client-policing are close substitutes for formal institutions such as courts, it could well be true that the premium to information I observe is due entirely to the complementary effects of informal institutions. Even in markets with formal contracts and enforcement, the types of forums created by the clients of male sex workers are common (e.g., AngiesList.com). As I documented, client communication dramatically raises the costs of deception because detection is likely. A dishonest escort may swindle one or two clients, but the possibility of doing so frequently is unlikely. Informal policing is critical to this market. Indeed, without the extensive policing by clients it would have been impossible to identify the signal used by escorts.
Second, although the market does respond positively to information here, it is not necessarily true that the response is of the correct size. For example, the face pictures may be a weak signal to which the market over-responds because there is little additional information to go on. In such a case, the returns to showing a face picture would be larger than the actual value of information it provides. For example, while showing a face picture may increase the likelihood of encountering a high quality escort, it may not increase the likelihood enough to justify the significant price premium. While the theoretical predictions held that the market would not respond to information, client demand could be such that the market responds too much to the relatively sparse information contained in face pictures.
The relationship between formal and informal institutions is inherently complex. I can say little about their interaction, since formal institutions play no role here. More empirical research is needed on the interaction of formal and informal institutions to estimate the degree of substitutability or complementarity between the two. While the results do not address how much the premium to signaling would change if there were formal enforcement in this market, this market shows that rich information environments alone allow escorts and clients to overcome the problems of asymmetric information.
The male sex market functions well despite its illegal nature. While it is easy to see that face-to-face interactions would minimize fraudulent activity, the analysis of the market for male sex work shows that even in online settings illegal markets can function well. The information that one would naturally seek out in face-to-face transactions is substituted with face pictures in the online market for male sex work. The fact that near-anonymous encounters between sex workers and clients takes place in a market where signals of both basic and service quality are well-correlated with prices suggests that the market for male sex work is, in fact, well developed.
Introduction
Prices in a market are only a piece in economic analysis. Economists are primarily interested in overall market structure – the ways that firms in a market interact with one another and how that interaction influences the way the market functions. Interaction in a market for sex workers is, essentially, the way that sex workers compete with one another for clients. Competition is key to consumer welfare – without firm competition, monopolistic or oligopolistic prices would be seen in the market. These prices would be higher than those seen in direct competition, and consumer welfare would suffer as a result. The open question is how competition in the market for male sex work influences the prices in the market. Prices are key for analyzing how competitive the market is, which is related to how much consumer and producer surplus exists. Now that the primitives of market prices have been confirmed to reflect market fundamentals such as the quality of escort services, the effects of competition can be explored.
The basic structure of online male escorting sets it apart from the most common type of sex work practiced. Escorts craft advertisements of their services and directly compete with other escorts on websites. This is rare for a service such as sex work, where usually a client can only choose between the sex workers who are actively seeking clients at the same time that a client is searching for sex workers. For example, given the use of the Internet, it is not possible for a male sex worker to appear on the market only at times of day when demand is high or low – his advertisement is visible at all times.2 Sex workers are constantly in competition with every other advertisement in their local area – they cannot choose times where the supply is low or demand is high in order to gain an advantage in the market.
This is a very different structure from street-based sex work, in which initial transactions among sex workers and clients (i.e., solicitations) occur in a public setting. Increasing access to and use of the Internet has provided clients with unique opportunities to secure meetings with sex workers outside of public scrutiny for both male and female sex workers. Street-based work is likely the most widespread form of prostitution across the globe and is also the most widely studied form of prostitution among health scholars and social scientists.3 Findings from a recent study in the United States suggest that online solicitation of female prostitutes is displacing street-based prostitution among certain population subgroups, particularly highly educated female sex workers. Through the analysis of FBI crime statistics, researchers have found evidence of a decreasing prevalence of street-based sex work among younger women (under age 40), which has been attributed to the increasing Internet-savvy client base for sex work.4
There are a number of additional differences between online and street-based sex work.5 The first difference is the scheduling of appointments for sex work as opposed to immediate transactions with clients. Sex workers who solicit clients online have greater control over the pace of their work and its parameters – they can arrange schedules to avoid fatigue, ensure timely appointments, and discuss the terms of the transaction in advance in a way that avoids the rush or pressure of immediate negotiations. This does include the potential downside of clients changing their minds or of finding another sex worker more amenable to their demands between the time of arrangement for a meeting and the time of the actual transaction. Movement to online simultaneously brings more potential clients to the market and increases the scope of market competition among sex workers for clients.
Another significant difference between Internet escorts and street workers is that the former are far more likely than the latter to travel long distances to different cities to meet clients. This is for several reasons. First, it is easier for clients to search for sex workers both inside and outside of their local market. If a client desires a particular sex worker, they can offer to compensate the sex worker to travel to them. Second, the Internet allows sex workers to advertise their services in several different markets – noting one as the “home” location and other areas as “travel” destinations. In other words, the online market expands the number of potential client/escort interactions and the scope of competition. Third, the Internet offers sex workers the ability to change their availability and willingness to serve other local areas quickly and at little cost. This not only allows escorts to change locations as they travel, but also to “test” locations to see if placing advertisements in a given area will be met with client demand in that area.
This type of traveling creates a unique type of competitive structure in the market for male sex work. While street-based and online sex workers compete against local competitors in a spot market, in the online-market sex workers also compete against those in other locations who can enter their market and serve clients. This makes the study of competition among male sex workers one in which traveling adds to the industrial organization of the market. Certain types of escorts may be more prone to travel and, conditional on their traveling, more prone to travel farther distances based on the services provided. The extent to which male sex workers serve multiple markets, how far these markets are from each other, and whether serving multiple markets is related to prices – all of these are unknown. While researchers have investigated the travel patterns of clients of male sex workers, there is very little research on the travel patterns of male sex workers themselves.6
Since male sex work does not use intermediaries such as pimps, each sex worker is an independent firm that competes against a number of different firms – other sex workers – for clients. In traditional analysis, the location of firms is quite important: firms should place themselves nearest to their consumers. When analyzing male sex work, the unique feature is that the firm is mobile and so is the competition. Economists usually study firm location as a one-time decision, and for good reason. Firms locating in an establishment do not move often. Sex workers, however, are inherently mobile, and therefore travel is critical in the study of competition in this market.
In the current online structure, sex workers cannot list different prices in different cities. For example, while escort prices may be higher in New York City, an escort serving New York City, a high-priced city, and Philadelphia, which has lower average prices, can only list one price, which applies to both markets. That is, sex workers cannot price-discriminate based on the markets they are serving. This means that the prices and propensity for travel among escorts in one city can influence the prices of male sex workers who do not travel and those who, if they travel, serve different markets than others who travel to different sets of cities. This effect would be a price spillover effect of sex worker travel – the prices of sex workers who do not travel could be influenced by the prices of those who do travel. The extent to which traveling has an effect on prices also shows how mature the market is – price differences between locations would tend to diminish as the market became more integrated. In a completely integrated market, the geographic price differences would disappear and the law of one price would hold.
Travel patterns also have implications for the sexual networks of male sex workers and clients.7 There are two effects of sexual networks. First, the travel of sex workers and clients has the potential to be a key factor in disease transmission.8 Second, sexual networks (serving cities with higher or lower prevalence rates for sexually transmitted infections – STIs) may influence the prices that sex workers charge if city-level risk factors affect prices.9 The ways in which escort travel influences the density of the sexual networks is important in both economical and epidemiological terms.
Differences in travel propensities by sexual behavior have particularly significant implications for sexual disease transmission. If male sex workers who participate in higher or lower risk behavior are more or less likely to travel, such differences could help us determine the transmission propensities for STI epidemics. For example, the relative risk of contracting HIV for receptive versus penetrative anal sex is 7.69, which suggests that penetrative (“top”) male sex workers could act as prominent vectors of transmission if they are more likely to travel, as their partners (receptive partners – “bottoms”) would be significantly more likely to contract HIV for a given sexual event.10 We do not know if travel propensity or the distance between travel locations is related to characteristics, sexual behaviors, or prices.
Furthermore, travel among sex workers creates a network of cities that are more or less linked to other cities due to the travel propensities of escorts and the similarity of travel destinations. The centrality of cities has implications for the prices that sex workers charge, for the potential spread of disease, and for the identification of cities in which efforts would be more effective in reaching a large number of sex workers through interventions. At a basic level, the identification of key cities tells us a great deal about the market for male sex work – where sex work is prominent and where there are more service providers. For example, cities that are popular travel destinations for sex workers may be cities where a larger number of sex workers can be reached, and the potential impact on other sex workers could be large.
Traveling is therefore a key component to male sex work. Economically, travel may have direct and indirect effects on the prices observed in the market. To the extent that travel reflects geographic variations in demand, travel may also provide clues to which markets are most lucrative for sex workers. Similarly, the effects that this travel has on the prices in the market are important for understanding market structure. As a result, traveling may create economic and sexual links between cities. Describing those links is critical to understanding how this market works at a national level.
In order to shed more light on this side of male sex work, this chapter examines the travel patterns and economic returns to travel among Internet-based male escorts. This chapter not only provides a description of male escort travel patterns, but also identifies the conditions under which male sex workers are most likely to travel (and thus to serve as potential vectors for STI transmission across cities and to influence the prices of multiple markets) and which travel patterns are most economically rewarding for the escort himself. In this chapter, the online advertisements of male sex workers are combined with city-level measures to derive network measures for the centrality of cities in the market for male sex work in the United States. A central city is a city that is not only popular among sex workers as a home location, but also one to which sex workers who live in other areas are likely to travel.
I begin by noting the traveling frequency of male escorts, which is substantial. In fact, the majority of escorts serve multiple markets. I then find that escort home location is only weakly correlated with the gay male population distribution, which implies that male escorts either see a large number of heterosexually identified clients or that escorts travel to locations with more demand for male sex work services. Building upon this groundwork, the chapter then proceeds with a detailed exploration of male sex worker travel, its network effects, and the price implications of travel. First, analysis of the travel patterns of male sex workers in the United States is used to estimate the degree to which propensities to serve multiple markets are correlated with advertised personal characteristics and sexual behaviors. The question here is whether particular types of escorts are more likely to serve multiple markets. Second, analysis of what factors specific to particular metropolitan areas lead them to be popular travel destinations for escorts is explored. The question here is whether there are particular city characteristics that make particular cities popular destinations for traveling male sex workers, and whether those characteristics are proxies for client demand. Third, I estimate the relationship between the frequency of travel among other male escorts to the home city and male sex workers’ travel patterns. This is an attempt to see if a given sex worker’s traveling behavior is influenced by the traveling behavior of competitors in the home market. Fourth, I estimate the economic returns to travel among the escorts and the price spillover effects of male sex worker travel.
The impact of sex worker location and travel patterns is shown to have a large impact on the way that this market works. First, sex worker sexual behaviors are related to the likelihood of traveling. Male sex workers who advertise submissive sexual services are more likely to travel than others, for example. Second, sex workers in cities with large gay populations are less likely to travel. This suggests that cities with larger gay populations have sex workers who are less likely to leave the area in search of work, likely because there is higher demand for their services since they are located in cities with substantial gay populations. Third, sex workers who live in cities popular as travel destinations for other sex workers (whether that city has a large gay population or not) are less likely to travel. This implies that cities where the sex work market is thick are cities where sex workers set up and from which they do not travel. Fourth, sex workers who serve multiple markets charge higher prices than others, rates are higher in cities that are central to the network created by sex worker travel (central cities in the network have higher prices overall than other cities), and the spillover effects on the prices of non-traveling male sex workers are significant.11 The market prices of traveled-to and traveled-from cities are brought closer together through the competition that traveling escorts create by serving areas with high demand.
Taken together, these results imply that the movement of sex workers does impact the market for male sex work in a meaningful way. The movement of sex workers acts to increase prices in the market. This is because sex workers who are likely to travel, travel to cities where prices are higher. This then causes the average price of their home cities to be higher as well. The traveling of sex workers also shows that overall market prices are partially driven by the high demand for male sex work in cities with large gay populations. Indeed, one of the key findings here is that sex worker home locations are not well correlated with the gay population distribution, but sex worker movement is correlated with gay population density. Consistent with the travel patterns, the key cities in the sex worker network are cities with large gay populations. Because of this, the connectedness of a city in the network is related to the prices in the male sex work market. The competition between male sex workers is more complex than the spot market faced by street sex workers, and the market is more integrated and sophisticated as a result.
(Gay) Location, Travel, and Male Sex Work
Given the use of online markets for male sex work and the disappearance of street-sex work, there are new incentives and economic opportunities for sex workers and clients. In the past, male sex work was highly concentrated in cities with large gay populations, where male sex workers could easily secure clients from the local area. If a client lived in a smaller city it may have proved difficult to secure the services of a sex worker. Searches of national print advertisements in earlier periods from the Advocate Classifieds show that few escorts were located in cities outside of the twenty largest in the United States as of 1990. Contrast that with today, where literally dozens of cities are served by at least ten male escorts. From Missoula, Montana to Sioux City, Iowa, clients can find sex workers who serve their local area.
The question for the market is the relationship between the size of the gay population and the concentration of male sex workers. It is important to note that the relationship between the size of the gay population and the concentration of male sex workers hinges on identification of the gay population itself. Since the work of Hooker (Reference Hooker1956, Reference Hooker1957), psychologists have noted that there is little to distinguish the homosexual and heterosexual, other than self-identification. Men who partake in homosexual acts are not distinguishable from the general male population.12 While early studies of male sex work focused on particular cities with large gay populations, later qualitative research revealed that a significant portion of the clientele of male escorts is heterosexually identified.13 Indeed, the “breastplate of righteousness” that Humphries (Reference Humphreys1970) saw in heterosexually identified men who took part in homosexual behavior has recently resurfaced in the public lexicon as prominent men, many of whom have been active in anti-gay organizations, have been embroiled in controversies regarding their sexual orientation.14 In the market for male sex work, such behavior may be common – male escorts regularly note that a significant percentage of their clientele is heterosexually identified, and many such clients are married to women. Since these men are hidden from the most common analysis of sexual minorities, the open question is how their presence in the market influences market function and composition.
This is not to say that there are not social distinctions based upon public affirmation of homosexual orientation. There are now a number of studies by demographers and economists that look at the population trends of the gay-identified population. The empirical studies show that openly gay and lesbian individuals do appear to be different on a range of outcomes, from earnings, to partnership status, to general socioeconomic position.15 It is still difficult to identify all sexual minorities in the data, but it is now possible to identify same-sex couples.16 Those population trends have been used to note that the geographic distribution of male same-sex couples is different from that of the general population in the United States.17 Two factors that seem to be related to gay location patterns are city amenities and the ability to congregate and socialize with a critical mass of other gay people, although alternative explanations that emphasize economic factors have been offered by Collins (Reference Collins2004). Whatever the reason for these location differences, this research poses interesting questions into the demography and geography of male sex work, as we know very little about the population size, demographic characteristics, and geographic distribution of male sex workers in the United States.
Given that heterosexually identified men may have much to lose if their same-sex sexual behavior is exposed, it could be the case that male escorts are more prone to locate in places where there are fewer opportunities for men interested in sexual encounters with other men to meet one another. Self-identified heterosexual men are unlikely to frequent gay bars, coffeehouses, or community groups where they would be more likely to encounter gay men for socialization or sex. This would suggest that male escort location might differ from that of the gay-identified population. Conversely, researchers note that gay communities do not attach the same level of stigma to sex work as do heterosexuals, and if gay communities are seen as safer havens for sex workers we would expect their geographic distribution to closely mirror that of the openly gay population.18
Research has shown that the geographic distribution of male same-sex couples is different from that of the general US population, and studies of male sex work in the United States focus on cities with large gay populations.19 If male sex workers can be thought of as independent businesses, they would need to take the market into account when deciding where to set up shop. For example, locating in a place where there are relatively few men seeking sexual services for hire would make little sense. It would be more profitable to locate in an area where there are more clients. On the other hand, every other sex worker is making a similar decision. This could lead to a situation where cities with high demand have a large number of sex workers to serve the market. Assuming that clients do not choose to move based on the number of sex workers in the local market, we would expect sex workers to locate optimally – cities with more client demand would have larger numbers of sex workers, but some sex workers would locate in less-popular markets because their services would be dearer to consumers. In the long run, the market would reach an equilibrium and sex workers would have a price that would correspond to the local demand, but since sex workers move in response to local demand (places with too many sex workers would have lower prices than places with too few), in the end there could be few differences in local prices for sex work.
To see how this would work, imagine a sex worker in a given area where there is a fixed number of clients and a fixed number of sex workers. Given this supply of sex workers and number of clients, the market would set the price of sex work at a given level. It could be the case that another sex worker in a different city would move to that city if the prices were higher there. This would serve to increase the number of sex workers, which would increase the supply and, all else being equal, would result in lower prices in the market. Now, if the sex worker were to see that another city had higher prices (because of a local undersupply of sex workers), he would move to that location if the moving cost were sufficiently low. The movement of sex workers would continue until the prices of sex work were no different in one location than in another – that is, there would be no incentive for sex workers to move due to price differences.
Theoretically, the movement of sex workers would correspond to the size of the client base. The location model of Hotelling (Reference Hotelling1929) predicts that, since the proposed client base is not uniformly distributed, distribution of service providers would be non-uniform; sex workers would need to be located close to the largest mass of potential clients. Tests of this theory for male sex workers are lacking. The unanswered question is whether the openly gay population constitutes the vast majority of the client base, or whether the number of heterosexually identified clients of male sex workers influences location patterns. If heterosexually identified clients are a significant portion of the customer base and if their location patterns are different from those of gay men, male sex workers’ location patterns could also differ from those of the gay male population to the extent that the patterns would be related to the non-gay clients they serve. Given that heterosexually identified men may have much to lose if their same-sex sexual behavior were to be exposed, it could be the case that male sex workers are more prone to locate in places where there are fewer opportunities for men interested in sexual encounters with other men. Conversely, researchers note that gay communities in the United States do not attach the same level of stigma to sex work as heterosexuals, and if gay communities are seen as safer havens for sex workers we would expect male sex workers’ geographic distribution to closely mirror that of the openly gay population.20 Therefore, the first area of interest is the home location of male sex workers.
Empirically, we would need to account for the city’s gay population in order to analyze the issue. Unfortunately, data limitations make generating reliable estimates of gay population difficult. The most widely used estimate for a gay population is the Gay Concentration Index (GCI). Since 1990, the US Census has included an “unmarried partner” category on the household roster. By examining the genders of primary respondents and their unmarried partners, households that are headed by two male partners can be identified. The proportion of two-male-headed households is traditionally used to estimate the concentration of gay men within cities.21 I estimate the GCI for each city in the advertisement data. For each city, I divide the number of households that are headed by two unmarried men by the number of two-person headed households (both married or unmarried) within the city. The resulting number represents the proportion of two-person-headed households within the city that are headed by two unmarried men. That number is then divided by the proportion of two-person-headed households that are headed by two unmarried men across the entire United States. The resulting measure, which can be used to measure each city’s gay concentration, equals 1 if the city’s Gay Concentration Index is equal to the national average, is greater than 1 if the GCI is above the national average, and is less than 1 if the GCI is below the national average.22 This proxy for the city’s gay population can therefore be used to investigate the location of male sex workers and the relationship of their location to gay population distribution.
Sex Worker Home Location and Gay Concentration
What is the relationship between the size of the gay population and the concentration of male sex workers? Table 3.1 shows the geographic distribution of male escorts who advertise online, where I count the actual number of escorts by the home location given in their advertisements.23 The size of the escort population varies considerably – there are more than 300 escorts in only one city, New York City, which has long been known in the media to have the largest male escort market.24 Atlanta, Los Angeles, Miami, and San Francisco each has more than 100 escorts, but most cities have considerably fewer. I also include the rank and size of the populations of each Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) as well as the Gay Concentration Index (GCI) to compare the location of escorts with gay male location patterns. To provide a broader picture of the distribution of male sex workers, I list randomly selected cities.
Table 3.1 Geographic distribution of escorts – selected cities
| City | MSA | Gay concentration | Number of escorts | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Rank | Population | Rank | Index | ||
| New York City, NY | 1 | 18,815,988 | 13 | 1.49 | 309 |
| Los Angeles, CA | 2 | 12,875,587 | 6 | 2.11 | 126 |
| Chicago, IL | 3 | 9,524,673 | 18 | 1.31 | 93 |
| Miami, FL | 7 | 5,413,212 | 14 | 1.46 | 119 |
| Washington, DC | 8 | 5,306,565 | 2 | 2.68 | 99 |
| Atlanta, GA | 9 | 5,278,904 | 7 | 1.96 | 108 |
| Boston, MA | 10 | 4,482,857 | 9 | 1.67 | 53 |
| Detroit, MI | 11 | 4,467,592 | 42 | 0.6 | 50 |
| San Francisco, CA | 12 | 4,203,898 | 1 | 4.95 | 124 |
| Seattle, WA | 15 | 3,309,347 | 5 | 2.21 | 33 |
| Minneapolis, MN | 16 | 3,208,212 | 10 | 1.61 | 33 |
| St. Louis, MO | 18 | 2,808,611 | 37 | 0.69 | 18 |
| Tampa, FL | 19 | 2,723,949 | 24 | 1.05 | 47 |
| Denver, CO | 21 | 2,464,866 | 12 | 1.53 | 41 |
| Portland, OR | 23 | 2,175,113 | 15 | 1.45 | 15 |
| Sacramento, CA | 26 | 2,091,120 | 8 | 1.71 | 17 |
| Kansas City, MO | 29 | 1,985,429 | 25 | 1.04 | 9 |
| Columbus, OH | 32 | 1,754,337 | 27 | 0.99 | 30 |
| Indianapolis, IN | 33 | 1,695,037 | 19 | 1.12 | 19 |
| Charlotte, NC | 35 | 1,651,568 | 45 | 0.49 | 19 |
| Austin, TX | 37 | 1,598,161 | 3 | 2.44 | 26 |
| Nashville, TN | 39 | 1,521,437 | 32 | 0.85 | 14 |
| Oklahoma City, OK | 44 | 1,192,989 | 34 | 0.83 | 3 |
| Buffalo, NY | 46 | 1,128,183 | 49 | 0.35 | 5 |
| Rochester, NY | 50 | 1,030,495 | 29 | 0.89 | 4 |
| Albany, NY | 57 | 853,358 | 31 | 0.85 | 5 |
| Correlation of number of escorts with Gay Concentration Index: | 0.39 | ||||
| Correlation of per capita escorts with Gay Concentration Index: | 0.69 | ||||
| Correlation of number of escorts with MSA population: | 0.92 | ||||
Counts of number of unique escort advertisements. Gay concentration is the fraction of the Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) identified as same-sex male partners in the 1990 Census divided by the national average. See Black, Sanders, and Taylor (Reference Black, Sanders and Taylor2007) for further details. MSA population counts from the Census Bureau. Cities with MSA rank >12 were selected at random from the fifty cities listed in Black, Sanders, and Taylor (Reference Black, Sanders and Taylor2007). The correlations in the lower panel are for all fifty cities listed in Black, Sanders, and Taylor (Reference Black, Sanders and Taylor2007).
In terms of location patterns, there is a striking trend – the number of gay escorts more closely follows the size of an MSA than it follows gay location patterns. For example, Detroit is the eleventh-largest MSA in the United States, and its gay concentration is 42nd, but there are 51 percent more escorts in Detroit than in Seattle, a city with the fifth-highest GCI. A similar finding pertains to other cities such as Chicago and St. Louis. Indeed, the correlation of the number of escorts with MSA population is quite strong (r = 0.92), but the correlation with the GCI is much weaker (r = 0.39). Also, the correlation of per capita escorts with the GCI (r = 0.69) is weaker than the correlation of escorts with MSA.
This result is consistent with the claims that the market for male sex work is national in scope and that it is not driven exclusively by gay-identified participants. If escort services were primarily demanded by self-identified gay men, we would expect the geographic distribution of male escorts to mirror the geographic distribution of self-identified gay men – male escorts would locate in places that have a higher concentration of those potential customers. The results in Table 3.1 imply that male escorts tend to concentrate in cities with substantial populations, as opposed to cities with substantial gay populations. This result holds even when considering mid-sized and smaller cities – it is not driven by cities that have large populations and large gay populations, such as Los Angeles. Overall, the evidence is consistent with the hypothesis that male escorts serve a market that includes a substantial number of heterosexually identified men.
Such analysis, however, is limited. The online market for male sex work is not a spot market and home locations paint an incomplete picture of the market and the locations for male sex work. Since sex workers may serve multiple markets it is possible that the results in Table 3.1, which only apply to home locations, do not describe the entire market and the provision of services more generally. Given the ease of traveling, a full study of the market, which allows for and investigates the likelihood of travel, is needed.
Escort Travel as an Economic Decision
Treating escort travel formally requires that one accept the proposition that escorts would be motivated by pecuniary benefits to travel. This is not to say that other factors could not enter into the decision, but in the case of sex work the economic benefits of travel would be most important when the traveling involved would be for the purposes of sex work. A formal approach would begin with the framework of economic models of migration.25 The models begin with the idea that migration (as an economic decision) is related to the cost and benefits of migrating. A standard migration model considers the wage that a potential migrant would earn in the current and potential new destination. For male sex workers, this must be modified to reflect the price they charge for their services. An additional factor is that escorts cannot discriminate in their pricing by charging different prices in different markets. This is consistent with the data, in which escorts can only post one advertised price that is seen by all online clients, irrespective of the client’s location. The key is the expected wage due to traveling. When sex workers travel to another city, they increase the supply of sex workers in that location, and therefore drive down prices unless demand is perfectly elastic. This implies that the city to which an escort travels has demand that is sufficiently inelastic to cause a wage gap that would still induce them to travel, thus allowing them to charge higher prices overall.
Travel could also be a signal of desirability among clients. To the extent that an escort serves multiple markets, it could be taken as a positive signal of demand for their services or a negative signal that they are very active in the sex work market. This would naturally vary at the individual client level, but how this would aggregate to the market price that a sex worker could charge as a function of travel is unknown. Ultimately, this is an empirical question.
This simple conceptual framework has several implications. First, the wages in the city traveled to must be greater (in expectation) than the wages in the current city.26 Considering the simple dynamics of supply and demand for escorts, the cities traveled to must be cities where the existing supply of escorts would be sufficiently low relative to demand so that the wages of escorts in those cities would be bid up. This implies that cities that are traveled to will be cities that, on average, have higher wages for male sex workers. In other words, popular cities for travel are hypothesized to be relatively high-wage cities for escorts and, given their higher wages, would make the escorts who travel to those cities higher-priced in their home locations.
Second, the potential for high wages in popular cities (cities escorts are likely to travel to) will cause escorts whose home location is that city to be less likely to travel to other cities. Indeed, to the extent that the wage in popular cities is related to that city’s popularity, escorts with those locations as a home base will be less likely to travel to other cities, as they have fewer economic incentives to do so. Third, we would also predict that the wages of escorts in cities that are popular travel destinations earn higher wages on average, since their locations are in cities with relatively higher demand (or less supply). Fourth, those escorts who serve multiple locations will have higher wages, on average, than those who serve only one location. Indeed, the fact that these escorts travel implies that the wage differential they see is large enough to induce them to serve multiple locations.27
The Male Sex Worker Travel Network
While the migration framework derives implications for an individual sex worker’s travel, it does not speak to the network that is formed when some cities are more popular than other locations. This network would imply that some cities would have stronger links than others since they would “share” more sex workers. For example, cities that are well connected by travel may be more uniform in their pricing than cities that share fewer escorts. In other words, cities that are popular, and the escorts who service those cities, would be more likely to have similar prices than an escort picked at random from a city that was not well linked to other cities. Consideration of the network created by sex worker movement requires some new measures that go beyond prices. Below, I define the key network measures that I incorporate into the empirical analysis to better describe the network created by escort travel.
A network perspective is useful for measuring dimensions of male escort travel patterns as it provides a formal means for measuring influential properties of both city- and individual-level characteristics that are theoretically linked to an escort’s likelihood of travel and their economic returns to travel. For instance, the Hotelling model predicts that sex workers would need to be located close to the largest mass of potential clients. Thus, I hypothesize that escorts are less likely to travel to other cities to meet clients when they are situated within cities that have high demand for the services of male sex workers. The question is, how to measure such a characteristic.
A city’s degree, which is the number of escorts who are residing or willing to travel to the particular city to meet clients, is indicative of its overall supply of male sex work, both home-based and traveling to that location. It should be the case that escorts who live in cities with high degrees are less likely to travel to other cities for work, as demand for their services is already high, as noted earlier. It should also be the case that travel is associated with higher prices. However, not all travel is equally rewarding. More specifically, escorts who travel to cities where demand for their services is high will experience greater returns to their work than men who travel to less-popular cities. In essence, a network approach captures the features of the extent of network travel in an empirically compact way.
Measures of Network Centrality
In order to measure features of both city and escorts’ positions within the travel network, I used the escort advertisement data and the locations noted in the advertisements to link escorts to cities and cities to escorts. In the network literature this is referred to as a two-mode (i.e., affiliation) travel network.
The two-mode travel network consists of escorts who are tied to particular cities through their residence or willingness to travel to the particular city. For instance, one-mode networks are frequently employed in the study of cash transfers between individuals and organizations or in the transfer of information and resources. Conversely, two-mode networks consist of ties between opposing node sets.28 Within this network, a tie exists between an escort and a city if the escort indicates in his advertisement that he is residing in or traveling to that city. Importantly, escorts are only directly tied to cities, and vice versa. This type of network allows for two different notions of centrality, where “centrality” is the network terminology for what we would consider “popularity.” An escort can be central to the network and a city can be central to the network. Escorts are central if they travel to several cities. Conversely, cities are central if they are visited by several escorts.
In particular, there are three measures of network centrality. The first measure is degree centrality. An escort’s degree centrality is measured by the number of cities he travels to, normalized by the number of cities in the total network. A city’s degree centrality is measured by the number of escorts who reside or travel to that particular city, normalized by the total number of escorts in the data.
The second measure of centrality reflects the fact that being tied to other escorts who are themselves tied to several other escorts through their links implies that popularity should incorporate the popularity of those to whom (escorts) or to which (cities) you are linked. Consider two cities that are visited by the same number of escorts. One city should be more central than the other if it is visited by escorts who travel to more places. Similarly, an escort is central if he travels to many cities. However, an escort who is relatively inactive in traveling (say, serving only two cities) could also be important if he should build ties between two or more cities that otherwise would not be connected. This second measure, eigenvector centrality, simultaneously captures the extents to which escorts travel to cities that are popular work and travel destinations among other escorts and the extent to which cities are visited by escorts who travel to other popular cities.29
The third measure of centrality is betweenness. Escorts and cities may also be central if it is possible to connect two cities (through an escort) or two escorts (through a city). In other words, a city can be thought of as central if it is the easiest path through which two escorts can be connected (relative to other cities) and an escort can be central is he is the easiest path through which two cities are connected. This means that a city or escort lies on several of the shortest paths that link other cities and escorts.
Another interesting feature to explore in the male sex worker travel network is the diversity of cities’ links with escorts. Escorts who travel to a city may be from the same city or from different cities. The former case may imply a special relationship between two cities (e.g., geographical proximity), while the latter case generally implies that the visited city is attractive to escorts. When considering travel it is important to distinguish between these two effects. We can evaluate how diverse a city’s links are by the measure of their entropy, that is, the geographic diversity of the escorts who travel to that particular city. Here, the diversity of city links with escorts is hypothesized to be highly correlated with the economic condition of the male sex worker market. A city with higher diversity should sustain higher service rates.
Measuring the Effects of Travel in Male Sex Work
I use two dependent variables related to traveling patterns and one dependent variable for price to estimate the empirical relationships described above. The two dependent variables for traveling are extensive travel and intensive travel. Extensive travel is a binary variable indicating whether the escort is traveling to other cities to meet clients to provide his services (0 = no, 1 = yes). Intensive travel measures the mean travel distance (in miles) between the geographic central point of the city of an escort’s home location and the center of the city or cities that he visits. Because this value is highly skewed by escorts with cities far apart from one another, I take the log of the distance to measure distance traveled. It is important to note that the cities are standardized in the data – escorts choose the location from a drop-down menu that best corresponds to their location and travel destinations. This produces a range of distances in a tractable way as opposed to having an escort list a city or area of a city that would be difficult to identify. The third dependent variable is the wage, which is the escort’s outcall price. The outcall price represents the hourly rate (in US dollars) that the escort charges his clients for an hour of his services. As noted earlier, the escort can only post one outcall price in his advertisement.
Independent Variables
As described earlier, escorts are also able to list a number of personal characteristics through drop-down menus in their advertisements. These might affect the prices charged in a number of ways. Here, these characteristics are used as controls so that the effect of networks on travel is estimated while including the effects that these characteristics may have. In particular, escort race, height, weight, body type, the escort’s advertised sexual behaviors, and whether the escort provides massage services in addition to escorting.
City-specific factors related to male sex work would be those related to local demand, the local sexually transmitted infection (STI) rate, and other factors that could influence both ease of access and the escort’s ability to provide services. As discussed above, the GCI gives a proxy for demand. For the local disease environment, accurate reporting is difficult, but the reporting for specific diseases is done at the city level. When looking at disease environments, however, it is important to note that STI prevalence itself works through sexual networks. Epidemiologists have noted that syphilis and HIV occur at greater proportions than other STIs among men who have sex with men. As such, syphilis and HIV have been used to measure the underlying STI prevalence of men who have sex with men. Since the two are strongly correlated, I chose the HIV rate as a proxy for the underlying STI environment. Calculation of the HIV rate is the number of HIV-positive individuals in an MSA per 1,000 people in the population. This is calculated by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (http://www.cdc.gov).
Lastly, cities may have properties that would structurally make them easier to serve as central locations. For example, a city that serves as a hub for a major airline, by definition, is easier to reach, as there will be a large number of direct flights to that location. I use information provided by 2012 US Bureau of Transportation Statistics to define a city to be an air traffic hub if its largest airport serves at least 0.25 percent of all enplaned passengers in the United States. This is the measure of the degree to which a city serves as a traveling pass-through, which implies a relatively large stream of potential clients for that location, as hub cities are popular business travel destinations as well.
Empirical Results
Summary Statistics
Table 3.2 provides the summary measures of travel for the network at the escort level. Slightly more than half of the escorts in the data, 55.6 percent, serve multiple markets, which suggests that travel is an important element in online male sex work. Conditional on traveling, the average distance traveled is approximately 240 miles. This implies that escorts are not merely serving other nearby cities, but are traveling relatively long distances when they serve other markets. Given the distance traveled, on average, it would seem likely that the choices of destinations would not simply be matters of convenience but explicit choices about which markets to serve.
Table 3.2 Summary travel and network measures, individual escorts
| Variable | Mean | Standard deviation |
|---|---|---|
| Escort travels? | 0.556 | 0.497 |
| Log travel distance | 5.466 | 1.227 |
| Escort degree | 0.009 | 0.005 |
| Escort eigen centrality | 0.011 | 0.012 |
| Escort betweenness | 0.001 | 0.001 |
Note: Total sample size is 2,022 for traveling and distance. Sample size for network measures is 1,926.
Table 3.3 shows the correlations between three measures of network centrality for escorts. The correlations between them are relatively slight, except the correlation between degree and betweenness centralities. Recall that degree centrality measures the number of cities that an escort visits while eigen centrality measures the popularity of those with which an escort is connected. The low correlation between the two implies that the propensity of escorts to travel (which is high, given that roughly half serve multiple markets) is only weakly related to the popularity of the links formed by that travel. This is intuitive: since most escorts travel, only a small fraction could reasonably be expected to be key in terms of popularity. The correlation of betweenness centrality and degree centrality is greater, and reflects the fact that the more connections an escort has, the more likely he is to be a conduit that connects those in the network. The correlations also imply that the measures of connectivity provide different information about the travel network, and each piece of information may play a different role in the market to the extent that escorts play different roles in the travel network under different definitions of centrality.
Table 3.3 Correlation of escort-level network measures
| Escort degree | Eigen centrality | Betweenness centrality | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Escort degree | 1.000 | ||
| Eigen centrality | 0.359 | 1.000 | |
| Betweenness centrality | 0.653 | 0.451 | 1.000 |
N = 1,926
The summary statistics at the city level are given in Table 3.4. Around a third of the cities in the data, 35.9 percent, serve as air traffic hubs. The average city in the data has a Gay Concentration Index of 1, which should be the case as the GCI measures the number of same-sex male households relative to the national average. On average, each city has an HIV rate of 13.2 per 1,000 people in the population. There is wide variation in the measures of GCI and HIV rate, however.30
Table 3.4 Summary statistics – city level
| Variable | Mean | Standard deviation |
|---|---|---|
| Airline hub? | 0.359 | 0.481 |
| Gay Concentration Index | 1.019 | 0.336 |
| HIV rate | 13.163 | 8.163 |
| City degree | 0.015 | 0.028 |
| City eigen centrality | 0.018 | 0.059 |
| City betweenness | 0.015 | 0.038 |
| City diversity | 1.146 | 0.832 |
Note: 131 cities are used in calculations
Table 3.5 shows the correlations between the centrality measures at the city level. Unlike the escort-level measures of centrality, the city measures of centrality are well correlated with each other. The high correlations (between 0.92 to 0.98) among network centralities at the city level suggest that central cities are consistently identified by different network measures. This is intuitive – a city that is well-traveled-to by escorts is highly likely to be a popular city and a city that would be linked to other popular cities. Also, a city’s popularity would make it a pathway through which two cities would be linked.31 Figure 3.1 shows maps of US cities in the male sex worker travel network. In each panel, the relative size of a city represents the corresponding network centrality or characteristics. The figure shows that the major cities in the East and West Coasts, plus Chicago, are central cities in the travel network for all measures of centrality. Detailed information of the top fifteen cities with the highest degree of centrality is provided in Table 3.6. The table shows that nearly all of the popular cities have many sex workers, once travelers are accounted for. In addition, every city in Table 3.6 has a GCI greater than 1, which shows that the city has more gay households than the national average.32 In general, all of the cities have relatively high HIV rates as well. The national HIV rate is 4.2 per 1,000 persons, and all of the cities in Table 3.6 have higher HIV rates.
Table 3.5 Correlation of city-level network measures
| City degree | City Eigen centrality | City betweenness centrality | City diversity | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| City degree | 1.000 | |||
| City eigen centrality | 0.918 | 1.000 | ||
| City betweenness centrality | 0.983 | 0.930 | 1.000 | |
| City diversity | 0.716 | 0.548 | 0.682 | 1.000 |
Figure 3.1 City characteristics and network centrality measures
Table 3.6 Top fifteen US cities visited by male sex workers
| City | Links | Average degree | Eigen centrality | Betweenness centrality | Airline hub | Gay Concentration Index | HIV rate |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| New York, NY | 374 | 0.203 | 0.571 | 0.297 | Yes | 1.308 | 29.2 |
| Los Angeles, CA | 252 | 0.137 | 0.231 | 0.175 | Yes | 1.512 | 13.0 |
| Miami, FL | 197 | 0.107 | 0.160 | 0.139 | Yes | 1.742 | 41.9 |
| San Francisco, CA | 175 | 0.095 | 0.123 | 0.112 | Yes | 2.414 | 16.5 |
| Washington, DC | 155 | 0.084 | 0.168 | 0.093 | Yes | 1.404 | 31.8 |
| Chicago, IL | 147 | 0.080 | 0.009 | 0.120 | Yes | 1.130 | 12.0 |
| Atlanta, GA | 141 | 0.076 | 0.058 | 0.114 | Yes | 1.590 | 20.0 |
| Orlando, FL | 124 | 0.067 | 0.048 | 0.076 | Yes | 1.121 | 26.0 |
| Dallas, TX | 118 | 0.064 | 0.051 | 0.080 | Yes | 1.295 | 16.0 |
| Houston, TX | 107 | 0.058 | 0.044 | 0.072 | Yes | 1.224 | 19.7 |
| Las Vegas, NV | 100 | 0.054 | 0.058 | 0.049 | Yes | 1.445 | 14.5 |
| Boston, MA | 90 | 0.049 | 0.088 | 0.046 | Yes | 1.147 | 8.0 |
| Philadelphia, PA | 80 | 0.043 | 0.082 | 0.036 | Yes | 1.060 | 23.1 |
| Riverside, CA | 77 | 0.042 | 0.055 | 0.022 | No | 1.282 | 7.6 |
| San Diego, CA | 74 | 0.040 | 0.047 | 0.022 | Yes | 1.411 | 13.1 |
Note: “Links” includes escorts listing the city as a location they serve.
Gay Concentration Index defined from 2010 Census.
HIV rate defined per 1,000 individuals.
The Travel of Male Sex Workers
The Likelihood of Sex Worker Travel
To describe the relationship between the extensive measure of travel, which is whether an escort travels or not, and personal characteristics, local market competition, and network measures of centrality, I use regression analysis. In particular, the regression analyzes the decision to travel as a function of the escort’s individual characteristics and the network measures of their home location.33 Since the city-level measures of centrality are well correlated with each other, I estimate the relationship between the city centrality measures in separate regressions.
Figure 3.2 reports results without the city-level measures of centrality as a benchmark. From the results, we see that Asian sex workers are less likely to travel than their White counterparts (the excluded race). Indeed, Asians are 10 percent less likely to serve multiple markets. Those with athletic and muscular bodies are 12 percent more likely to travel than thin sex workers (the reference group). Both top and bottom sex workers are more likely to travel, but bottom sex workers are much more likely to travel than tops.34 While top escorts are 8 percent more likely to travel, bottom escorts are 20 percent more likely to travel. Indeed, in nearly all specifications, the coefficient on bottom sex workers is more than twice the size as that for top sex workers.
Figure 3.2 Escort characteristics and the probability of traveling
The greater likelihood of traveling for bottom sex workers has implications for the spread of STIs. The traditional view among public health researchers is that sex workers can act as a vector of infection because they could potentially spread diseases to their clients. In the case of male sex work a key element in such an argument would hinge on whether sex workers, should they be infected, would participate in sex acts that would place their clients at greater risk of disease transmission. Those who are receptive in intercourse face a higher likelihood of being infected with STIs from their sexual partners, but this also implies that clients seeing those sex workers would be less likely to be infected. At a basic level, this travel pattern implies that traveling sex workers would be less likely to spread disease, as those who are bottoms are more likely to travel.
In all specifications, the Gay Concentration Index is negatively related to the likelihood that an escort serves multiple locations. A one-standard-deviation increase in the GCI decreases the probability of traveling by more than 3 percent. This is consistent with the idea that cities that have large gay populations have a larger client base for escorts located there, leaving the sex workers who live there less likely to travel to other cities to provide services. The city HIV rate does not have a significant effect on the likelihood of traveling. The indicator for city air traffic hub has a negative effect for traveling, but it is not statistically significant once city network measures are included.
For the centrality measures, displayed in Figure 3.3, the results are somewhat mixed. In the figure, the city centrality results are presented from their separate specifications for comparison. City degree centrality is not found to have a significant influence on a worker’s traveling decision. The insignificance of city degree centrality is largely due to its correlation with the Gay Concentration Index.35 This is intuitive to the extent that cities with a high gay concentration would have relatively larger numbers of gay men (potential clients) and therefore would be cities that would be linked to more escorts, to the extent that escorts travel to those cities where demand is relatively high. The city eigenvector and betweenness centralities do exert a significant and negative effect on the likelihood of traveling.
Figure 3.3 City centrality measures and the probability of escort travel
Recalling that city network centralities reflect cities’ popularity in this travel network, they are also proxies for the demand for male work in a city, so male sex workers who live in particular cities with high centralities will have less incentive to travel. In other words, when a worker is located in a city that is central to the network, that condition acts as a disincentive to travel (to serve additional locations). The diversity of city link, measured by entropy, is also found have no significant effect on traveling.
Overall, some personal characteristics are related to the likelihood of traveling, and they run counter to the idea that sex workers would serve as vectors of transmission of diseases. Also, the concentration of gay men in a city is negatively related to the likelihood of travel. The network measures suggest that cities central to the network created by gay travel are correlated with lower travel propensities. That is, cities that are popular among sex workers as travel destinations are also cities from which the resident sex workers are unlikely to travel.
The Distance of Sex Worker Travel
Knowledge of the determinants of travel is only one aspect of understanding the decision to serve multiple markets. There is also the question of how far the markets are from each other. For example, the traveling and the results of the previous section could be driven by escorts serving nearby locations. Here, I replace the extensive measure of travel with the intensive measure of travel, the log of the average distance traveled between the home location and the cities visited.
In these results I exclude the sex workers who do not travel. As before, I report results for the characteristics that excluded the city centrality measures, and then compare the effects of the city centrality measures. From the results in Figure 3.4, I find that Black and Hispanic workers travel shorter distances than their White counterparts. Sex workers with athletic and muscular body builds travel longer distances than thin workers. No sexual behaviors have a significant relationship with traveling distance (and they are excluded from the figure). While the behaviors did predict travel, they do not predict the distance traveled.
Figure 3.4 Escort characteristics and traveling distance
Similarly, the Gay Concentration Index of the home location does not have a significant effect on traveling distance of sex workers. The HIV rate in the home location has no significant effects on male sex workers’ travel distance, either. The most significant environmental influence is whether or not the city is an air traffic hub. The positive coefficient for city hub suggests that air traffic convenience significantly contributes to longer traveling distance for workers in those cities. Given that the average sex worker who travels goes a distance greater than 300 miles, the use of air travel (and the ease of air travel when being located in a hub city) does have a positive influence on the distance traveled.
All of the centrality measures have a positive effect on the distance traveled. These are reported in Figure 3.5. Degree and betweenness centralities have statistically significant effects on travel distance. The implication is that traveling workers who live in central cities of the travel network travel longer distances, on average, than workers who live in peripheral cities. The city network diversity is also found to have a positive effect on workers’ traveling distance. These results, when combined with the results for the extensive measure of travel, suggest that sex workers in cities central to the network are less likely to travel, but when they do travel, they travel farther distances.
Figure 3.5 City centrality and the distance traveled by escorts
This is intuitive. Imagine two escorts who are similar in every aspect except that one lives in a city that is a popular travel destination and the other does not. The escort who does not live in a popular travel destination is likely to travel to his nearest popular city. The escort who lives in a popular travel destination, is likely to travel a greater distance than the other escort, who is closer to a popular destination but does not live in a popular destination. That is, if living in a popular city and traveling to another popular city, those escorts by definition will travel greater distances than those who are not in popular cities, as escorts whose home location is not popular can select the nearest popular city to serve.
Travel and the Prices of Male Sex Work
While the previous results analyzed the determinants of travel, traveling should be related to remuneration in some way if escorts are indeed acting as business operators. As described earlier, the wages of escorts should be related to the popularity of the cities they live in and their own propensity to travel. Also, the cities that are popular should have higher wages for escorts, which would reflect the fact that traveling by escorts is due to the demand for escort services in those cities. When demand outstrips supply, prices should be higher.
First, I analyze the relationship between the extensive measure of travel and wage rates in Figure 3.6. I find that the effect of travel (extensively measured) on the wage rate is significant and positive, which shows the economic return to travel for male escorts. It is the case that traveling escorts charge higher prices than escorts who do not travel. On average, sex workers who travel charge 8 percent more than sex workers who do not travel.
Figure 3.6 Escort travel, city properties, and escort wages
In some specifications, I interact the traveling indicator with other measures to investigate the possibility that the returns to travel differ by other characteristics.36 In that model, traveling sex workers charge 20 percent more than non-traveling sex workers. Part of this difference is due to the existence of heterogeneity within the travel premium. For example, Black and Asian escorts who travel do charge more than black and Asian non-traveling escorts, but they charge 2 and 8 percent less, respectively, than white escorts who travel. On the whole, traveling workers of non-White races receive lower wages than Whites. The results show that traveling indeed is one way in which a sex worker can earn more, but even here some differences remain.
At the individual level, sex workers who are muscular charge 18 percent more than thin escorts (the excluded group). No other personal characteristic is shown to have a relationship to the wages of travelers. Regarding environmental influences, city GCI does not have a significant effect on rates charged. However, Figure 3.6 shows that city HIV rate shows a significantly positive correlation with wage, which reflects the wage premium for job risk that varies across geographic areas. The results for HIV rates are similar to the wage effects seen for female sex workers, whose wages are positively correlated with STI prevalence.37 When the risk of HIV infection is greater, the rates for sex work increase. This is consistent with higher disease prevalence being an implicit part of sex worker compensation and the disease risk in the market. A city’s traveling convenience, captured by the airport hub indicator, also has a significantly positive effect on wage.
Second, traveling should be related to the centrality measures of the locations traveled to, if those centrality measures are related to the demand for sex work services. These results look at how wages are affected by individual and city network centralities. The results are reported in Figure 3.7. It is important to note that both sex-worker- and city-specific measures are used in these specifications to investigate the relationship between a sex worker’s network position and wages in addition to the relationship that being in a city of a given network level has with wages. The city-level network measures have consistent correlations with the rates charged by male sex workers. All three city network centralities have significant positive effects on wages, which implies that male sex workers charge more when they live in central cities of this travel network. For example, a one-standard-deviation increase in city degree or city betweenness increases the wage rate by 2.3 and 1.79 percent, respectively. The result implies that the position of the city of residence for a male sex worker matters in terms of price. The more central a position a city has, the higher the wage rate he charges. I note that this holds for sex workers who travel and those who do not – as such, it is an effect of being in a central location itself, and not of their own propensity to travel. This is consistent with more popular cities being more expensive cities for sex work. As such, these cities have higher wages than others for sex work.
Figure 3.7 Escort and city centrality and escort wages
Finally, I focus on male sex workers who travel. There, the centrality of the cities they visit and its relationship to wages is presented.38 However, after I control city network centralities, the effect of the airline hub seen in Figure 3.6 becomes statistically insignificant. This suggests that the hub acts as a proxy for network centrality, such that the inclusion of network centrality reduces the effect of a hub. The interaction terms of travel indicator with city GCI and HIV rate show that travelers from cities with high HIV and GCI may ask for a lower wage rate, but the estimates are only marginally significant.
I use the result to answer an additional question – travel to cities where demand for services is high results in greater return than travel to less popular cities. The return of traveling to popular cities is captured by including average network centralities and characteristics of destination cities in the wage equation for travelers. The results for destination-city network measures are reported in Figure 3.8. The results show that the GCI and HIV rate of destination cities do not affect wage rate. However, all three network centralities and network diversity of destination cities have significant positive effects on the wage rate of travelers. For example, a one-standard-deviation increase in the degree centrality and betweenness centrality of the destination city increases wages by 2.5 and 2.3 percent, respectively. The result provides empirical evidence to support the hypothesis that escorts travel to cities with high demand for male escort services.
Figure 3.8 Destination city centrality and traveling escort wages
There is an additional implication of traveling that can be tested. Cities that are popular destinations for escorts are cities where the average price for escort services is higher than in other cities. Also, the previous results have established that escorts are less likely to travel when their home location is in a popular city. This implies that cities that are not popular contain sex workers who travel (and therefore charge higher rates) and those who do not (and so charge lower rates), while popular cities have escorts who are less likely to travel. Taking both of these into account, there is an implication that there will be less dispersion of prices in cities that are popular, because escorts in those cities are less likely to travel. Using the interquartile range of prices (the difference between the 25th and 75th percentile of prices in a given city) for a city as the measure of price dispersion, I find that network centralities and link diversity are negatively related to price dispersion. The more connected a city is by network, the less dispersion there is in prices. This is consistent with the phenomenon of price dispersion in a city decreasing with a city’s centrality – this means that popular cities are high-price cities where a client is less likely to find a low-priced escort. The lack of price dispersion would be consistent with the law of one price, where the price of a good in a market is invariant if the market is competitive. It is also a fact that price dispersion is negatively related to the gay concentration, which implies that in cities with a larger number of potential clients there is less price dispersion. This is consistent with a competitive market in which sex workers lose their ability to price discriminate. Clients in less-popular cities will be more likely to find escorts at a variety of price points, owing to the presence there of both stationary and traveling escorts.39
Conclusion
This chapter presented the first empirical analysis of male sex worker competition in the form of travel. Serving multiple markets increases the number of potential clients for a given sex worker, and as such this chapter concentrated on travel patterns and their effects on prices in the market. Even more, it adopted a network approach to assess the interlinks that cities have due to the travel of male sex workers. The market for male sex work involves a great deal of movement, and this movement is related to market demand, as opposed to non-market factors. Male sex workers travel to locations where demand is high (and prices are high). I also showed that the movement of male sex workers, a measure of market competition and incentives in the market, has an effect on the price of male sex worker services. The first key finding is that male sex workers who advertise on the Internet have a propensity to serve multiple markets. Traveling escorts are more common than stationary ones. Overall, male sex workers are highly mobile. This mobility causes market prices to be linked through the traveling of male sex workers, since escort travel is related to market demand. The market for male sex work is not a spot market, but rather a mature market with key cities that nationalize the male sex worker market by serving as hubs for male sex workers.
The relationship between the home locations of male sex workers is not strongly related to the location patterns of gay men. It does not appear that male sex workers are concentrated in areas that have relatively dense populations of gay men. At a basic level, this suggest either that a significant portion of the client base is not gay-identified or that the ease of traveling allows male escorts to locate at home bases that are not correlated with gay location trends. Intuition would suggest that sex workers would locate or serve the markets where there is significant demand, which would presumably come from gay-identified men. Given the high degree of traveling, however, the lack of a relationship between home location and gay population distribution necessitates an analysis of the traveling decisions of male escorts.
While overall location patterns were not related to gay population density, male sex workers in cities with large gay concentrations are less likely to travel than other escorts. Intuition suggests that the reason these escorts do not travel is that their home location is one where demand is reasonably high. This suggests that male sex workers in cities with large gay populations would be less likely to form links between cities, as they are less likely to travel. It is the escorts in low-gay-concentration cities who travel to high-gay-concentration cities. It is these escorts that drive the links between cities that create the network of male sex work in the United States.
I also showed that travel was not equally likely among all types of escorts. Certain personal characteristics of male sex workers are correlated with an escort’s willingness to serve multiple locations. Escorts who advertise submissive sexual services are more likely to travel. This traveling behavior has implications for the sexual network inherent in male sex work, which has been the largest area of research since it has implications for disease transmission. As the likelihood of receiving the transmission of certain STIs is more likely for submissive sexual partners, the results would imply that submissive male sex workers who travel could simultaneously be more likely to have an STI and less likely to transmit the STI to clients. This result runs counter to the idea that sex workers could act as vectors of transmission of disease, as the sex workers traveling more are those who are less likely to transmit disease.
Lastly, male sex workers who serve multiple markets charge higher prices than others and rates are higher in cities that are central to the network created by sex worker travel. This suggests that the returns to travel are significant for escorts, that travel is related to demand, and that the market prices overall are connected due to the fact that traveling escorts serve high-priced cities. Sex worker movement is related to market incentives in the form of higher prices. The popular cities appear to be those with high demand for sex work services, and as such the incentive to travel to these cities is that they are lucrative options for sex workers, as the wage differential is significant.
In all instances, the market is broadly consistent with relatively simple models of economic agents responding to incentives provided by the market. Male escorts travel to markets that are high-priced markets, where the demand for their services is high. This leaves the market with a relatively small number of popular cities that escorts travel to provide services. For the escorts who live in these cities, the high wages they enjoy give them fewer incentives to travel. Indeed, when they do travel they travel farther distances as they must seek out more lucrative markets, which are at a greater distance. Beyond this, the cities that are popular from centrality-based measures of sex work are high-priced cities where there are fewer low-priced sex workers working.
It appears that escorts make reasonable economic decisions about their location patterns. They remain in and travel to cities that are high priced, and these cities appear to be cities where demand for their services is high. In particular, the results here suggest that the inclusion of network measures is important to understanding the economic incentives involved in the returns to traveling and sex worker service provision. The market for male sex work is not only a sexual network, but an economic one as well. The connectedness of the market is evidence of the maturity of the male sex work market. Sex workers appear to be aware of the geographic price differences and they respond to them. While the price differential remains between markets, the effects show a degree of market integration that has never been empirically observed for male sex work before. While not a national market with one price, which would occur in a fully integrated market, this integration shows a level of market development and maturity that cautions against treating male sex work as an economic anomaly or as an institution with few market features.
