Taking it from the streets to home computers and smart phones

Police have charged Alix Catherine Tichelman with manslaughter in the heroin overdose death of a Google executive on his yacht.

Jessica Guynn reports at USATODAY that

The glare of the national spotlight is on Silicon Valley sex workers after news broke this week that an alleged prostitute is charged with leaving a Google executive to die on his yacht in Santa Cruz, Calif., after shooting him up with heroin. The Internet is rife with anonymous websites that match sex workers with clients and help them avoid being arrested or assaulted. The websites have both broadened the sex market and helped customers hire prostitutes more discreetly. Scott Cunningham, an associate professor at Baylor University who studies the economics of prostitution, said the Internet has made the sex trade "extraordinarily efficient," taking it from the streets and red-light districts to home computers and smartphones. "Before the Internet, clients didn't know where to find the prostitutes and prostitutes did not know where to find the clients. If you think about it in an economic sense, the Internet has removed a lot of the friction from the market," Cunningham said. "And when you reduce search friction, you get a lot more searching and a lot more of that activity."

Read more here.

Freebies

Instapundit links to an abstract by two economists. It is about prostitution in Chicago. Among the findings:

A prostitute is more likely to have sex with a police officer than to get officially arrested by one. We estimate that there are 4,400 street prostitutes active in Chicago in an average week.

The transaction-level data we collected suggests that street prostitution yields an
average wage of $27 per hour. Given the relatively limited hours that active prostitutes
work, this generates less than $20,000 annually for a women working year round in
prostitution. While the wage of a prostitute is four times greater than the non-prostitution earnings these women report (approximately $7 per hour), there are tremendous risks associated with life as a prostitute. According to our estimates, a woman working as a prostitute would expect an annual average of a dozen incidents of violence and 300 instances of unprotected sex.