Sexual Economics: An Econometric Study of a University Greek System.
详细信息
文摘
Sexual economics can be defined as the study of the time,effort,and resources that humans expend to engage in sexual activity. While psychology and popular culture ascribe sexual motivations to broad categories of human action,economics has been slow to provide quantitative models of sexual decision-making. In this analysis,the principle of social exchange theory is adapted to explain fraternity and sorority members' incentives to engage in casual sexual relationships. The scope of sexual economics is thereby elaborated to feature institutional factors,which,due to supply and demand dynamics,are hypothesized to have opposite effects for men (in fraternities) and women (in sororities). Social exchange predicts that men in high status fraternities should receive casual sex at a lower price whereas women in high status sororities should receive higher prices for casual sex. Original data was collected from 477 individuals across 35 fraternity and sorority houses at a single university. They are analyzed using ANOVA and Poisson regression to achieve a consistent estimator for the "price of sex" in terms of relationships and fraternities' alcohol. Finally,the data are used to demonstrate the current controversies of peer effects econometrics. Contrary to the seminal sexual economics theory,it was found that women in the high status sororities receive lower sex prices than others. Conclusions pertaining to sorority governance are offered as concluding remarks.