Blog: Economics in Action

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Two odd pieces of economic research have been highlighted in the Ig Nobel Prizes, awarded each year by the magazine the Annals of Improbable Research.

The first study examined tips given to lap dancers. Unfamiliar with lap-dancing, Geoffrey Miller and colleagues read up on the relevant sociological and feminist literature before getting eighteen dancers to record their earnings for two months. They found that earnings were greater when the dancers were ovulating: the male patrons expressed a preference for dancers who were currently fertile, even if not consciously aware of the difference.

The other study was by behavioural economist Dan Ariely and colleagues, who found that the placebo effect of a pill was weakened when the pills were discounted in price. In other words, some medicines are more powerful in virtue of being more expensive.

The full references are Geoffrey Miller, Joshua M. Tybur, Brent D. Jordan (2007) “Ovulatory Cycle Effects on Tip Earnings by Lap Dancers: Economic Evidence for Human Estrus?” Evolution and Human Behavior, vol. 28, 2007, pp. 375-81; and Rebecca L. Waber, Baba Shiv, Ziv Carmon, Dan Ariely (2008) “Commercial Features of Placebo and Therapeutic Efficacy” Journal of the American Medical Association, March 5, 2008; 299: 1016-1017.

Matthew Reisz reports in the Times Higher Education about the rebirth of economics, ‘today the “dismal” science of economics is sexy’. Tim Harford and Stephen Levitt are held somewhat responsible for the distinct change in attitude, with simple economics being used to explain anything from ‘rational crime’ to ‘the teenage oral sex craze’.

The publication of The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics compiles contributions from not only 1500 economists but also other fields, a Swedish zoologist for example, supporting the end of ‘dismal’ economics.

Read more: Matthew Reisz (2008) Figure It Out Times Higher Education

Human beings ability to cooperate with each other lies behind our success as a species. But since the skills of coalition-building are essentially for masculine activities notably hunting and warfare they have also been the key to mens subjugation of women.

That was the central message of Professor Paul Seabright when he delivered the 2005 Royal Economic Society Public Lecture on Thursday 8 December in Edinburgh and again on Friday 9 December in London.

Professor Seabrights lecture took his audience through a tour of the many ingenious strategies that males and females have used to manipulate their partners and rivals, from primates to prehistoric humans to modern men and women. He concludes:

Cooperative man was the key to our civilisation but he has used his success to isolate, confine and control the women in his life.

(more…)

This is the title of a research paper by economists Lena Edlund and Evelyn Korn, in which they consider the relative appeal of marriage and prostitution for women, and (closely linked) the relative appeal of wives and prostitutes for men.

Michael Noer in Forbes magazine shows wittily that the economic perspective on marriage is bleakly unromantic, but admits the point of the research is not to illuminate romantic feelings (for which we already have a culture’s worth of art and poetry) but to answer a specific question, namely, “Why do prostitutes earn so much money?” Is it compensation for the violence and disease which they are exposed to, or compensation for the fact that no-one wants to marry a prostitute?

Found via the book Economics Uncut: A Complete Guide to Life, Death and Misadventure, edited by Simon Bowmaker, which has many examples of economic research into topics like drugs, crime, abortion and gambling and includes Edlund and Korn’s original paper.

Economics research has a surprisingly large amount to say about dating, sex and relationships. Take Alan Collins, for whom personal ads are potential research data. Collins – an economist at the University of Portsmouth – researches topics including the economics of love, sex and dating. (Rock bands and cigarettes also feature in his research, but not at the same time).

He and his colleagues apply economic analysis to personal ads and to survey data. In “The Surrender Calue of Capital Assets: The Economics of Strategic Virginity Loss” he looks at the extent to which people lose their virginity because of being in love. He finds a reliable difference between male and female attitudes, with males more likely to pursue sex for its own sake and females more likely to use virginity “strategically” as a way to get romance.

It may be a common generalisation, but research like this can examine to what extent it is true, and how attitudes to virginity loss are affected by religion, age and the way in which subjects learned about sex.

Read More: (You may have to have university internet access to read these research papers)
“Surrender Value of Capital Assets: The Economics of Strategic Virginity Loss” Journal of Bioeconomics, v2 n3, October, 2000
“Gender Differences in Mate Search Effort: An Exploratory Economic Analysis of Personal Advertisements”, Applied Economics, 1998, 30, (10), 1277-85

Listen to the interview

Providing family planning services for young people has little impact on pregnancy rates and may have contributed to the dramatic increase in rates of sexually transmitted infections (STIs) among young people. That is the conclusion of research presented at the Royal Economic Society annual conference by Professor David Paton of the Nottingham University Business School.

The research casts further doubt on the wisdom of the Government’s Teenage Pregnancy Strategy, following on from the announcement in February 2002 that the latest figures show an increase in teenage pregnancy rates, following several years of decline.

Since the start of the Teenage Pregnancy Strategy in 1999, there has been a major expansion of family planning services in the community aimed specifically at young people. Although teenage pregnancy rates in England have decreased somewhat since 1999, diagnosis rates of sexually transmitted infections have rocketed by 24.3%.

Professor Paton’s research looks at every health authority in England to see whether those areas that have increased family planning services for young people the most have also experienced the biggest decrease in pregnancy rates.

In fact, there is almost no correlation at all, even when a range of other social and economic factors are taken into account. The research also demonstrates that controversial schemes to provide the morning after pill to teenagers free of charge at pharmacists have not reduced teenage conceptions. In contrast, areas with bigger increases in family planning services have experienced significantly bigger increases in sexually transmitted infections among teenagers.

Professor Paton comments:

‘One of the problems with research on sexually transmitted infections is that we only have data on diagnoses and not on actual infections. With some of these infections, most notably chlamydia, there are often no symptoms at all. It could be that the increase in diagnosis rates just reflects the fact more young people are aware about diseases like chlamydia and are getting themselves tested.’

‘In fact, the notable feature about my results is that I found a significantly positive correlation between increases in family planning services and increases both in rates of chlamydia and in rates of those sexually transmitted infections where the symptoms are more noticeable.’

One explanation for these results is that easier access to family planning for young people may have been partly responsible for the increase in risky sexual behaviour among young people. The increase in this risk-taking behaviour may then have outweighed any positive impact of family planning policies.

The research suggests that economic and social factors, such as improved levels of educational achievement, are the factors that are most likely to affect teenage pregnancy rates.

Professor Paton believes that policy-makers can learn important lessons from his research:

When you introduce policies that seem to be obvious, it is important to factor in the possibility that the policies may actually cause people to change how they behave.

In this case, it appears that some measures aimed at reducing teenage pregnancy rates induced changes in teenage behaviour that were large enough not only to negate the intended impact on conceptions, but to have an adverse impact on another important area of sexual health sexually transmitted infections.

Notes

Random Behaviour or Rational Choice? Family Planning, Teenage Pregnancy and STIs by David Paton will be presented at the Royal Economic Society’s 2004 Annual Conference at the University of Wales Swansea on Monday 5 April.

David Paton is Professor in Industrial Economics at Nottingham University Business School.

STI rates are diagnoses among all teenagers at GUM clinics in England per 10,000 young people aged 15-19.

The latest data for teenage pregnancy relate to 2002 and were released in Health Statistics Quarterly on 26 February 2002. The rate of conceptions to girls under 18 was 42.6 per 1,000 in 2002, compared to 42.3% in 2001.

For Further information contact Romesh Vaitilingam on 0117-983-9770 or 07768-661095 (email: romesh@compuserve.com).

Related information

You can find other publications by this author, related research and citations from IDEAS and you can search for more Internet resources on the topic of STIs on SOSIG.

Economics in Action is a collaboration between the Royal Economic Society, the Economics Network of the Higher Education Academy and SOSIG, the Social Science Information Gateway. It forms part of the Why Study Economics initiative.