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I have to disagree. In my experience I feel like the whore market is one of the least well arbitraged markets in the world.
One limit to arbitrage would be that market participants have a limited shelf-life to figure out the market and outsourcing to management (pimping) is much enforced criminally. And sharing information and tactics online seems more difficult than other markets.
I am going to assume the very best girls don’t even become whores. Steve Jobs wife would never become a whore because Stanford MBA and attractive makes it trivially easy for her to marry well. So I feel the supply side of the whore market can’t be power law because the far right tail just does marriage. Depending on your taste the far right tail of females are Tom Brady or Steve Jobs wives.
And then you have Miami. Where the strip clubs are basically brothels and like $500 gets you a girl hotter than these SF escorts. The price in Miami really is 5-10% of San Francisco. If you believe these girls and their $4k/hour claims.
So my guess is this is much more a story of market inefficiency. Some girls probably did find a magic marketing technique and location. And few hot girls want to live in San Francisco. So the high price is a lack of knowledge by other whores on marketing and a huge premium for having to live in San Francisco.
I believe a lot of this is just search costs. Whores don’t know how to market to tech nerds. Tech nerds don’t know how to find whores. The ones that know how to connect the two make a lot.
Listen I get all this, this all makes sense to me. What I'm saying is that the subset of women who are likely to become escorts don't get this and it doesn't make sense to them. Start talking to them about arbitrage and they'll fall asleep before you finish, in either sense.
You don't have to be a genius at economics to understand "Less hot girls are making more money than you in escorting while doing less. If you want to make more money, you just need move to where there are more rich, lonely, awkward guys." While I don't finish that fast, I'm pretty sure you don't need to elaborate much more for this to be within intellectual reach of anyone with an IQ of 95. Probably 90.
And I think the market situation tells us, clearly, that women with high enough IQ to comprehend and execute that plan, while also being willing to be prostitutes and prostitutes to nerds, are in short supply.
I am not convinced. Per google, the most expensive bottles of wine cost about half a million. This does not mean that there is a supply shortage of wine, merely that weird things happen when the uberrich engage in bidding wars. If the median price for an escort in SV was 10k$, then I would conclude that there is indeed a supply shortage.
Those bottles of wine are in short supply. If you can't comprehend of being in the market for those bottles of wine or those escorts, then you probably just don't understand the market in question. "Weird things happen when people engage in bidding wars" isn't an explanation, why is there a bidding war if there is infinite supply?
The funny thing about those bottles of wine is I believe there have been a few cases of counterfeiter just mixing cheap stuff and labeling it different. And they got away with it for years until they were caught. So the drinkers didn’t know the difference.
My gut says the $4k hookers are a lot like the wine and it’s marketing + badly informed consumer with a lot of money.
In the actual case you're probably thinking of it was a fairly elaborate mixing operation, utilizing bottles of very good wine mixed with a variety of wines to match the flavor profile, and based on an experienced oenophile's knowledge of the expensive wines. Most of the cheap mixing wines were still wines I would consider very expensive to drink at my own table!
But regardless, marketing is part of the good from a supply and demand perspective, for both the wine and the gash. Sure, it all feels the same in the dark, but actually making the sale for that kind of money requires a sales effort. And if the kind of marketing in the pornography/escort space that Aella achieves were easy for many thousands of women in the pornography space to do, we wouldn't know who Aella was and be discussing and referencing her constantly on this website.
Yes it’s the case.
I agree with a lot of what you say, but I still probably place more emphasis on regulatory frictions limiting arbitrage than you. I would say in many ways it’s like the old floor traders at the NYSE or CBOT that made a lot of money but were sometimes like Iowa St or Fordham grads when now markets are ran by like some Chinese dude who won a math Olympiad. Each takes advantage of knowing flow to profit but the Chinese dude couldn’t just show up to the exchange back in the ‘80’s and ‘90’s. Prostitution is basically not prosecuted unless it’s associated with other social disorder while even high end pimping is. The average hoe doesn’t know she should be reading AI doomerism and then throw a few quotes on a website to increase her rate 4-8x. There is only a few that fall into the niche which is kind of like a Fordham grad who had a cousin at the NYSE so started showing up there when he realized their was money.
In a parallel universe where the CIA decided they wanted intel on AI bros and lesser tech bros thru a prostitution ring in San Francisco and tasked me with setting it up with like a million in start-up capital and immunity from prosecution I think I could do it. And cause hoe deflation in San Francisco. I would hire some web guy to make me a bunch of websites; have some training academy where the girls read like SSC, some sci-fi, a few AI-doomer books; rent a bunch of apartments; spend some money prepping them at fancy restaurants. So yes I think you could just counterfeit a bunch of Aella’s crew. So to me the main barrier is regulatory that management is illegal. There are few girls who naturally: 1. Know to live in SF 2. Have a natural inclination to tech bro stuff 3. Have a physical attraction 7.5-8.5 4. Want to be whores. (3) is common enough. (4) common enough if the money is good. (1) and (2) are rare but I think could be taught.
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