Free Dollars and Sex by Marina Adshade

sexual partners.
    If women outnumber men in college, and if sex markets are essentially closed (students have sex only with other students and nonstudents sex only with nonstudents), then in the population of people aged 19 to25 who are not students, there must be more men than women. We have already shown that when men outnumber women there is more traditional dating, which would explain why nonstudents have sex more frequently than do those operating on the college market; it is because they are more likely to be in a relationship than their college counterparts.
FINAL WORDS
    Poor Sarah! It is too bad she didn’t see this evidence before her disastrous first term. Maybe then she would have understood that while she was freely making her own sexual decisions, she was also subject to market forces that were beyond her control. This is good information for students, parents, colleges, and governments to have if they want to make informed decisions around promiscuity on college campuses.
    For example, parents who worry that promiscuity will impose a high cost in the long run on their college-aged children would be well advised to look for schools in which male students outnumber female students. That argument probably seems counterintuitive to those parents whose daughters are college bound, but when seen within the economic environment, it makes sense to avoid putting your daughter in a position in which she needs to compete with many other women on the market for college dates.
    Likewise, colleges that worry that the cost of student promiscuity imposes too high a cost on the institution—for example, when it leads to high rates of student attrition—might consider if they are giving preferential admission to female applicants. If they are, then eliminating that bias should raise the “price” of sex on their campus (measured in terms of the investment needed to secure a sexual relationship) by making male partners less scarce. Raising the price of promiscuity should reduce the overall level of casual sexual relationships on campus.
    Again, the economic approach yields counterintuitive advice; it recommends that in order to lower the rate of casual sex and raise the rate of traditional dating on campus colleges, they should encourage the enrollment of more students who are naturally inclined to be promiscuous, that is, men.
    My final example of how useful this information is for those who want to make informed decisions stems from the recognition that the college sex market is not an entirely free market in the sense that it is subject to the outside influence of government policy. Governments have the power to influence college sex markets through laws that control the distribution and taxation of alcohol. You might very well feel that governments have no business in the bedrooms of the nation. However, if specific alcohol policies (like having a legal drinking age of 21) are leading to binge drinking and, as a result, higher rates of promiscuity on college campuses, then changing those policies is not, in the market sense, interfering in the sex lives of the individual. On the contrary, it is removing an existing market distortion that has already shifted the equilibrium away from the one that would be found in free market.
    Again, applying the statistical tools used by economists leads us to a counterintuitive recommendation—alcohol prohibitions that encourage binge drinking should be removed if governments feel that promiscuity imposes too high a cost on students and society.
    Eventually, almost everyone decides it is time to search for a longer-term relationship (and the possibility of more frequent sex!). When that happens, many people will consider using the Internet to find themselves a mate. And for that, I thank them. Online dating has provided economists with a virtual treasure trove of data with which to untangle the desires of the human heart. It is a little voyeuristic, I admit, but you