Say, ladies. A couple of economists—Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner of Freakonomics—have unearthed a most satisfying and lucrative career option for us all: Prostitution! There's only one problem: even though our two Steves are really brilliant economists, they just can't figure out why most of us women don't want to have sex for tons [...]

In last month's "Capital Ideas," a publication of the Chicago Booth school of Business, Steven Levitt gives the Freakonomics treatment to Chicago-area prostitution. The conceit of "Trading Tricks," as with Levitt's examination of the inner-city drug trade [PDF], is that prostitution is a market like any other.
Levitt, along with Columbia University professor Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh, [...]