
Why do high-end prostitutes make so much money? - cwan
http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2010/01/why-highend-prostitutes-make-so-much-money.html
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jsz0
Presentation. Escorts wear nice clothes, speak the language properly, and are
talented enough to pass off as a wife or girlfriend if that's what you're
looking for. They can roll with a wealthy business crowd and not stick out too
much. Just good ole' fashion market demographics at work. I'm sure some metric
of success among the people who use their services is to brag about how much
money they spent on a high end call girl. No different than bragging about
your new $60k car in the driveway.

~~~
ardit33
I think it has to do with the perception of the quality.

The single biggest risk on sleeping with a prostitute is getting a (or
multiple) STDs, or even HIV.

If you sleep with a street hooker, your risk of getting something is
relatively high (even if you use condoms, and all that). That street hooker
that cost a hundred buck for couple of hours, probably sleeps with 20-30
people a week. Talking about used good. This is actually really risky.

A high end prostitue, could get away with sleeping with only few people a
week, and still make good money. She probably is sleeping with only rich
people, so the risk factor is different. The chance of her getting something
from her are a lot lower.

Plus I heard that the high end ones, look really good, compare to the regular
ones.

The really high end ones, are the ones that act as a gf. They don't get paid
directly, but basically splurge on everything they can using your credit card.
If you have seen the move "Priceless", it is a good one to watch:
<http://www.pricelessthemovie.com/> (mostly a comedy). But the "gf" for the
month, phenomena is real in Europe, and some countries in South America.

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Mz
_Mayflower Madame_ is an autobiographical piece with some info related to this
topic. She had a few women working for her who were paid $500/hr (iirc), in
part because they were just so much more beautiful than the others. The book
also has some hilarious tales, for example of gay men hiring the same girl
over and over to be a fake gf for weddings and other family events. In one
case, the family liked the girl so much, she and the gay man had to stage a
dramatic break-up because his family wanted him to marry her. The author had
insider information and didn't have to do a survey to get her numbers (or her
explanations as to why X amount was charged), so they are probably a bit more
reliable (though dated at this point).

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Towle_
I'd like to point out that the methods employed here to survey the wages of
prostitutes leave plenty of confounding variables in play. "Analyzing wage
information on more than 40,000 escorts in the U.S. and Canada collected from
a web site, we find strong support for EK."

1\. Remember from statistics class what the problem with conducting polls via
random telephone calls to thousands of different homes? Not everybody has a
phone, and the reasons are nonrandom. Well, not every prostitute has the
internet...or advertises on the internet...etc.

2\. Just "a" website? Only one? Well, this isn't _necessarily_ a problem-- so
long as the conductors of the study can provide reason to believe the
population of prostitutes advertised on this particular website is
demographically no different than the total population of (be it "high-end" or
"all") prostitutes into whom they attempt to gain insight. Yeah, good luck
with that.

3\. Are we assuming that the listed hourly rates of the prostitutes on the
website exactly correspond with what ends up being charged? This can swing
results in several different directions: perhaps some bartering occurs on
occasion, maybe special deals can be had ("Two-for-one, ehh? Oh, but only for
the 26- to 30-year-olds? Well damn."), maybe they round off the time spent "on
the job". In addition, the _averaged_ 'hourly rate' a prostitute charges often
decreases as the total time billed for the evening increases ($50 for 15
minutes vs. $100 for 45 minutes, for example), which would make it difficult
to guess at true wages from one number alone ($/hr), given that the math will
inevitably be done differently from prostitute to prostitute (as well as from
pimp to pimp, if one is involved). And let's not even start down the road of
analyzing the "a la carte menu"...just know that each girl could have a
different menu with different prices, or even no menu at all. Again, good luck
to the study conductors in dealing with all these confounding variables.

4\. Etc.

Point: Though I haven't read anything more than the abstract, I nonetheless
highly doubt that this study was done in the proper statistical manner. "Good
enough" never really is. If there are confounding variables, they need to be
eliminated. Otherwise, no conclusions can be reliably drawn.

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ErrantX
Because they are selling a lot more than "just sex".

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adatta02
you are after all paying them to leave after.

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profquail
Hah, you're missing the point. The kind of men that pay for super-high-priced
call girls are just as often looking for an educated, interesting woman to
talk to as they are for sex. Lots of the "elite" call girls have higher
degrees, for example, or are well-traveled.

I posted a Hulu link to the CNBC episode of "Dirty Money" where they talked
about the high-end of the prostitution business. It's pretty eye-opening if
you take the time to watch it.

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Nelson69
I saw the special and I honestly think that's a myth, at least most of the
time. It just seems like a rationalization, the guys can tell themselves they
can't find a suitable mate and have to pay these women, the women can say and
think they're paid for more than just sex, everyone wins, it's not just high
dollar prostitution. The other thing that the kind of guys who pay for super-
high-priced call girls want is silence, silence regardless of who asks and
silence when a tabloid offers $10k for the story. To me that's much more
logical than a rich, educated guy not being able to find an educated female to
converse with.

It might be true to some degree but the reason you pay a hooker isn't for the
sex, it's for the discretion. Think about it for a second, if she's hot and
educated and can be with him in public, why doesn't he just marry her? He's
rich, she wants money, it's almost perfect. Why do they maintain the
prostitute and john relationship?

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Mz
_Think about it for a second, if she's hot and educated and can be with him in
public, why doesn't he just marry her?_

If he wants to keep enjoying a certain quality of experience, marriage may not
be the best means to get that. Wives usually stop dressing as well as they did
when they were dating. Housework takes more of her time and energy. There are
endless jokes about women having no energy for sex after doing housework and
raising kids all day. A woman who is expected to look good 24/7 and "perform"
for him at the drop of a hat...well, it's not very realistic. A prostitute
only has to meet that standard during work hours and can then go home, take
off her high heels and make-up, and not care what he would think about it
because he isn't there anymore to judge her.

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Nelson69
Yes but we're not talking about a typical love marriage, are we? Those are
things that could be put in a prenuptial agreement. Then to social taboo goes
away, "she's his wife."

Or rather, how about high dollar matchmaking services instead?

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pstuart
It sounds like 'leasing' rather than 'renting', both of which are different
than 'buying'.

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profquail
CNBC did a really good report on this for their "Dirty Money" show a while
back. It's on Hulu, and definitely worth a watch if you have the time, if only
for the economics and social perspective it gives you:

[http://www.hulu.com/watch/83070/cnbc-originals-dirty-
money-t...](http://www.hulu.com/watch/83070/cnbc-originals-dirty-money-the-
business-of-high-end-prostitution)

~~~
mattm
Anyway to watch this outside of the US?

Edit: Found it on their website -
[http://www.cnbc.com/id/15840232?video=1183761885&play=1](http://www.cnbc.com/id/15840232?video=1183761885&play=1)

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nicolas_t
As an aside, I'll tell about my experience in Asia for lower end prostitutes
salaries...

A friend of mine in China was the boyfriend of a massage salon madame (she
started out as a prostitute, saved money and opened her own salon later on).
In this salon, it was mostly handjobs, the price was 70RMB + tip (so usually
around 120RMB -> 17$) ... out of this the salon took 40RMB and 30RMB if the
girl was requested directly (in the case of a return customer). The best girls
get about 4-5 customers/day. To compare, at the time I paid my cleaning lady
10RMB/hour and the official minimum wage in shanghai is 680RMB (but in
practice a girl working as a waitress fulltime is paid 1000-1200RMB/month).
Those are prices from 3 years ago. So a successful girl could earn at least
7000RMB/month and the most successful girls would move over to higher end
salons where they could get more money (higher end salons would charge 2x/3x
as much for the same service). That's higher than the starting salary of
someone who graduated from a good university like jiatong daxue.

Another element of comparison, where I used to live in japan, there was a
soapland next to my house that was hiring new girls and showed the salaries...
The salaries were around 6000-8000$/month...

So outside of high end and street workers, I think there's quite a few number
of not college educated girls who make a very decent living of the trade much
better than if they did normal jobs (one chinese girl I met in japan was doing
this kind of job to pay for her studies).

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tjic
Two words:

Veblen Good.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good>

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mikebo
I would guess most people who see prostitutes don't want other people to know
about it. Every other Veblen good I can think of is the opposite -- the idea
is to conspicuously consume.

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profquail
You're right...most people who see prostitutes don't want other people to know
about it.

On the other hand, most of the people who see _high-end_ prostitutes _do_ want
people to know that there's a charming, beautiful woman with them for a
certain occasion or whatever (but obviously they fail to mention that she's
being paid to be there).

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joe_the_user
_"Why are high-paid prostitutes paid highly?"_

Seems to be begging the question a bit, perhaps? (With evidence of bias
towards proving his pet economic theory).

Further, the reference quoted only found a high hourly wage for prostitute
through scanning records. That high hourly could be a matter of the particular
"worker" only getting a few gigs and having to invest unpaid time in setting
up the transactions as well as having to share earning with pimps/escort
services. Considering this kind of thing happens on the edge of legality, the
real income of an escort probably couldn't be found through merely looking at
accounting records.

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teeja
The dollars aren't for putting the 'X', they're for knowing _where_ to put the
'X'.

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michaelcampbell
There's a whole chapter in Levitt's SuperFreakonomics that covers this and a
lot more about the economics of prostitution. Good reading.

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jerryji
Isn't it econ-101 demand and supply?

It simply shows that the demand overwhelms the supply of people who are both
willing and capable of doing the job.

