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The Hotel Room Purchase Task: Effects of Gender and Partner Desirability on Demand for Hypothetical Sex in Individuals with Disordered Cocaine Use and Controls

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Abstract

Hypothetical purchase tasks allow for rapid assessment of behavioral economic demand for numerous commodities and are useful in evaluating reinforcer pathologies, such as substance and behavioral addiction. Currently, there is not a task for evaluating demand for sex without requiring implicit engagement in sex work. The current study used a novel purchase task with hotel rooms for sex as the hypothetical commodity to assess demand for sex in individuals with disordered cocaine use, a population that frequently engages in risky sexual behavior. Adults meeting criteria for cocaine abuse or dependence (13 males, ten females) and noncocaine-using controls (eight males, three females) chose hypothetical sexual partners from a series of photographs and endorsed two partners with whom they would most and least like to have sex. Participants then completed the hotel purchase task for both partners, wherein they reported how many nights at a hotel room, at prices from $10 to $1280 per night, they would purchase in a year. Demand intensity was significantly greater and demand elasticity was significantly lower for the most preferred relative to the less preferred partner. Males demonstrated significantly greater intensity and lesser elasticity for sex than females. Demand metrics did not differ between the cocaine and control group. This task may serve as a useful measure of demand for sex without requiring implicit hypothetical engagement in sex work. Future studies exploring the relation between task performance and other characteristics such as sexual dysfunction, in addition to acute substance administration effects, may further determine the task’s clinical utility.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Crystal Barnhauser and Grant Glatfelter for excellent technical assistance in recruitment and data collection, Natalie Bruner, Ph.D. for study preparation, and Leticia Nanda, CRNP, for collecting blood samples and providing HIV counseling.

Funding

The work was funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse [grant numbers R01DA032363 and T32DA007209], but the funding agency was not involved in the study design, data analysis and interpretation, or preparation of this manuscript.

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Correspondence to Matthew W. Johnson.

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The authors have no conflicts of interest to declare.

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All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards. All experimental procedures were performed in accordance with the 1964 Declaration of Helsinki and were reviewed and approved by the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine Institutional Review Board.

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Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

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Dolan, S.B., Johnson, P.S. & Johnson, M.W. The Hotel Room Purchase Task: Effects of Gender and Partner Desirability on Demand for Hypothetical Sex in Individuals with Disordered Cocaine Use and Controls. Arch Sex Behav 49, 1251–1262 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-020-01634-w

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-020-01634-w

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