Signalling, Falling Costs, or Both?

NPR has a story about how having sex without condoms is the new way that people show they are committed to one another. I wonder if this is a kind of signal. In signaling theory, there is a signaler and a recipient of the signal. The recipient sees a crowd of women of two types - one type who loves him, and another type who doesn't. Asking the crowd which one loves him isn't going to reveal anything because talk is cheap. So, the ones who love him decide to send a signal. The signal is costly, but can be observed by the recipient, and enables him to differentiate between the women who love him and the women who don't. The cost is borne by the girl sending the signal - in this context, it represents some expected cost of pregnancy or contracting an STD from him. I suppose it signals trust that he will not abuse the vulnerable position she has placed herself in. This is at least one way of maybe thinking about this. (I previously blogged about how this may be related to signaling here.)

Also related to this is a Page Six story about the rise unsafe sex practices in New York and its connection to romance and romantic feelings. From the link.

It was after 4 a.m. on a Sunday morning last month when Sophie and Jeff drunkenly stumbled upstairs to his East Village walk-up. They had met a week earlier at an art gallery opening, and now, after a few drinks at Gallery Bar, followed by a nightcap and a joint at Jeff’s apartment, they were having sex when the condom broke.

“We pinky-sweared we were both clean, and continued having sex,” recalls Sophie, 24, a painter who lives on Avenue A and who is not on birth- control pills. “In the morning, we got Plan B [an over-the-counter emergency contraception pill] and split the cost. It was kind of romantic. I’m sure he was sleeping with other people, but the condom had been his idea, so I wasn’t worried about STDs because I figured he was a regular condom user.”

This, too, seems to suggest that there is some kind of romance-unsafesex relationship. Maybe it's signaling; maybe not. Heck, signaling aside, maybe it's caused not just by information asymmetries, but rather because STDs really aren't dangerous in 2008, and pregnancy risk is so easily controlled by the new abortion technologies. I've written about this before, but the increased efficacy of the protease inhibitor and other antiretroviral treatments have reduced the expected costs of unsafe sex by increasing the life expectancy of HIV -positive patients. Increased legal and safe access to new abortion technologies, like the Morning After Pill, have also likely had substitution effects away from protected sex towards unprotected sex. In the event pregnancy occurs, or ejaculation during intercourse occurs, individuals can have a procedure done at relatively low cost (both reputationally and financially) the next day. The Page Six article has several relevant quotes along these lines.

Of her patients who get a check-up after having unprotected sex outside of a committed relationship, Dr. McDaniel says “most of them come in a month or so after the incident, and they aren’t scared. They’re resigned. A lot of them take Plan B so they’re not worried about pregnancy, and they’re not super-worried about sexually transmitted diseases. But they should be, because if someone has a one-night stand with you, they probably had a one-night stand with someone else.”

So why are young people having unprotected sex? “Part of it’s the invulnerability factor,” says New Yorker Yvonne Fulbright, author of The Hot Guide to Safer Sex. Dr. McDaniel says one 23-year-old patient recently tested positive for HIV and “she wasn’t even upset. This generation sees Magic Johnson, they see you can live for a long time with HIV—they don’t see walking skeletons like in the ’80s.”

“Once STDs and death seemed synonymous,” adds Moe. “Today, the accepted reality is that the STDs one is likely to contract through unprotected sex are more mundane, which is underscored by the fact that so many of them are cured using the same antibiotics you’d use for a sinus infection.”

I don't think it can just be explained by signaling, even when we do see it occurring in these kinds of weird romance environments because I get the sense the change is relatively new. More likely, it's the falling costs of STDs and pregnancy (through increased access to abortion technologies) that creates an environment where these types of relatively low cost signals can occur. In a high-AIDS time, for instance, the costs of the signal would've been prohibitive even for the women who did love the man. It's more likely that the costs have fallen enough but not too much. Regarding protease inhibitors, if HIV-positive patients expected to die in only a few years as was once the case, I expect we'd see more of this type of protective, cautious behavior. Ahituv, Hotz and Philipson found in their 1996 JHR study, "The Responsiveness of the Demand for Condoms to the Local Prevalence of AIDS" that a 1 percent increase in the local prevalence of AIDS increases the propensity of people to wear condoms by as much as 50%. Several papers have also found, similarly, that the increased availability of emergency contraception is related to sexual risk taking. One paper found that it was related to increases in chlamydia, for instance.

It may not be enough to convince Elisabeth that people are sometimes rational in their sex lives, but I think it does suggest that the demand for sex is not unitarily inelastic with respect to prices and life expectancy.