GUEST JOINT REVIEW: Very Important People, by Ashley Mears

Very Important People: Status and Beauty in the Global Party Circuit, Ashley Mears (Princeton University Press, 2021).

The following is an email exchange between John Psmith and Gabriel Rossman, Professor of Sociology at UCLA, edited slightly for clarity.

John: Among the American Indians of the Pacific Northwest, there is a custom called “potlatch.” A potlatch is a feast commemorating a birth, a death, a wedding, or a communal ritual occasion. It has all the usual feast stuff — singing, dancing, drunken revelry, recitation of epic poems and renewal of ancient grudges — but there’s one additional feature to a potlatch that might be less familiar to our readers. As the party reaches its climax, the host of the potlatch reveals a collection of valuables: artisanal handicrafts, or precious items made from bone and ivory, culinary delicacies, alcohol, artworks, the rarer and more valuable the better. And then, all these treasures are heaped into a pile and burned in a giant bonfire.

The point, of course, is to show off how rich you are by showing off how much crystallized labor you are able to destroy. This pattern is not an uncommon one across human societies — a lot of human and animal sacrifice, while ostensibly religious in motivation, has this sort of showing off as an undertone. But what makes the potlatch especially interesting is its competitive nature. The Indians believe that as the goods are consumed by the blaze, every other wealthy man is “shamed” unless he comes back and burns objects of equal or greater value. It’s value destruction as a contest, like a dollar auction for status where the final price is set on fire rather than being paid to somebody, a negative-sum machine for destroying economic surplus.

Good thing our culture is way too civilized to do anything like that.

I don't remember when it was that you told me I had to read this book about VIP “models and bottles” service at nightclubs, but I’m glad you did because it’s sort of like the Large Hadron Collider but for human social practices. By analyzing behavior under these extreme conditions, certain patterns that are normally obfuscated (often deliberately so) emerge with stark clarity. Much of your research focuses on “disreputable exchange” — the ways people buy and sell things while hiding the fact that they're buying or selling something. Have you been able to get the NSF to pay for a night out in South Beach yet?

Gabriel: I should start off by disclosing that I’m friends with Ashley. However I don’t think that biases my opinion since the reason we are friends is that I admire her work.

Potlatch is one of the most interesting cultural practices in the world and the keystone upon which both economic anthropology and economic sociology are built. Indeed, you left out just how amazing it is in that not only did the native peoples of the Pacific Northwest destroy property in the form of salmon, blankets, and copper; but also wealth in the form of human beings, as they would use the occasion to both free and kill slaves. To us 21^st century WEIRD Americans, murdering a slave and manumitting a slave seem like opposites, because manumission is humane and human sacrifice is brutal. But from the logic of status competition, they are alike in that both demonstrate that one is so wealthy that one can afford to give up the value of some of one’s slaves. Thus we see that not only the Tlingit but also the Romans would both murder and free slaves in funerary contexts.¹ Patterson’s Slavery and Social Death has some very interesting material on this and is generally the greatest work of comparative scholarship on economic institutions since Max Weber — I hope to review it with you or Jane some day.

Now imagine it’s your job to describe one of the most interesting things to have ever happened, a ritual of passive-aggressively inviting rivals to parties that gavage your guests and culminate in wealth bonfires and human sacrifice, and the only thing you find worth emphasizing about it is how mean the Canadian government was to suppress the practice. This is how the Gene Autry Museum here in Los Angeles describes it, and you see similar emphasis at other museums that follow the curatorial heuristic of maximizing pious status redistribution and involvement of the descendants of the community being described, while avoiding at all costs anything that would serve as such a near occasion of awesome as to lead your internal monologue to roll tape for the Basil Poledouris score to Conan the Barbarian.

So now that we know what potlatch 1.0 is, why do I describe the models and bottles scene as a douchebag potlatch? There’s no human sacrifice, and the rivalry is a bit more friendly, but otherwise bottle service has a lot in common with a traditional potlatch. Most obviously, it is a ritual of competitive feasting where powerful men show off how much they can waste. The nightclubs are well aware of this and actively encourage “bottle wars,” where different tables compete to see how many bottles they can order. The service the club offers is not intoxication, but the spectacle of other clubgoers (and the home audience on Instagram) seeing how much the customer can spend. And so they don’t merely send a busboy or a waitress to quietly deliver the bottle, as would be the case at Applebee’s, but a bottle girl carrying bottles festooned in sparkler fireworks and, in one particularly decadent instance, the manager dressed as a gladiator and riding a chariot pulled by busboys. And once the bottles are drained, the bottles remain at the table. At a normal bar or restaurant, uncleared dishes would be a sign of lazy staff, but at a bottle service club the debris is an accumulating trophy that makes visible to all the consumer’s glorious expenditure.²

So far we’ve been discussing bottle service from the consumer’s point of view as a potlatch, but the core of the book is that it requires an enormous amount of extremely convoluted work to mobilize models as a sort of rent-an-entourage to be guests at the potlatch. Veblen observed that one of the functions of dependents, and indeed the primary function of dependents with little or no functional purpose, is to consume beyond what a rich man could consume himself and thereby demonstrate the rich man’s wealth and power. A Wall Street bro can probably consume a lot more alcohol than a woman with a body mass index of 18, but several underweight women at the bro’s table can considerably expand the amount of alcohol that the table can collectively consume. The distinctive feature of bottle service is that rather than the guests being either the host’s long-standing dependents or the host’s frenemy and the frenemy’s long-standing dependents as in a classic potlatch, the models are strangers to the host and their presence is arranged by the club, which subcontracts this to party promoters. I suppose this isn’t totally unprecedented since the synoptic gospels’ parable of the feast (Matthew 22 and Luke 14) also involves mobilizing a bunch of randos to benefit from the host’s largesse; but (a) the host in the parable relied on randos as a substitute when his regular dependents blew off his invitation, and (b) the parables aren’t intended to be realistic stories so aren’t good evidence than an actual 1^st century AD host would behave this way.

As to whether I’ve gotten a grant to pay for bottle service, mercifully no. I have had dinner with a (former) model, but it was Ashley herself at the kind of restaurant that occasionally has a hedge fund Powerpoint deck critiquing its management go viral. It was a decent hour, both of us were completely sober, there was no party promoter arranging the meeting, and there was no EDM played at OSHA-violation decibel levels. My idea of a good time is a lucid conversation with a smart friend, such as both that occasion and this email exchange, whereas I’d pay a good amount of money to avoid getting extremely drunk and staying out until dawn in an environment too loud for conversation.³ However I salute Ashley for doing so and thereby providing us with this book. The most I’ve had to suffer for my scholarship is writing response memos to annoying reviewer questions, or struggling with merge errors whilst munging data files.

And yet, contrary to my own taste, the people at the night clubs are paying a lot of money and/or waiting in line to get in, so obviously they seem to think it is appealing. I don’t think we can call this false consciousness either. Ashley is very clear that part of the reasons the models go to the clubs is as a favor to the promoters (much more on that later), but part of it is that a lot of models think going to a famous night club is really glamorous and cool. I'm tempted to say this is just de gustibus non disputandum, but just shrugging at taste is kind of a cop out for a sociologist since one of our mandates is to explain socially patterned taste.

I think a key explanation for what’s going on is Girard’s mimetic desire. The club is glamorous because there’s a long line of people outside waiting to get past the velvet rope. The women are beautiful because everyone agrees that tall skinny women are beautiful, even though in other contexts a lot of men (including the promoters) are more attracted to the kind of shorter curvier women who are barred entry to the club as “midgets.” Everyone and everything in the world of models and bottles that is desirable is desirable primarily because they or it are desired by others.

John: I’ve never read a fashion magazine or watched a runway show, so I just naively assumed that models were stunningly attractive and feminine. But as Mears points out, the models are not actually to most men’s tastes. They tend to have boyish figures and to be unusually tall.⁴ Is this because the fashion industry is dominated by gay men, who gravitate towards women who look like teen boys? Whatever the origins of it, there is a model “look,” and the industry has slowly optimized for a more and more extreme version of it, like a runaway neural network, or like those tribes with the rings that stretch their necks or the boards that flatten their skulls. There’s actually a somewhat uncanny or even posthuman look to many of the models. The club promoters denigrate women who lack the model look as “civilians,” but freely admit that they’d rather sleep with a “good civilian” than with a model. The model’s function, as you say, is as a locus of mimetic desire. They’re wanted because they’re wanted, in a perfectly tautological self-bootstrapping cycle; and because, in the words of one promoter: “They really pop in da club because they seven feet tall.”

The men don’t want to sleep with the models, and by and large they don’t. This leads directly to one of the most jaw-dropping insights in the entire book: the models are a potlatch of sorts too. The men are buying thousand dollar bottles of champagne and dumping them out on the floor, destroying economic value just to show that they can. And likewise, they’re surrounding themselves with dozens of beautiful women and then not sleeping with them. A potlatch of female beauty, sexuality, and reproductive potential — flaunting their wealth by hoarding women and conspicuously declining to enjoy their company, but at the same time denying them to every other man. An anti-harem.

Actually, you know what else the models remind me of? Medieval jesters. There was a point in the 15th century when every ruler in Europe had to have a dwarf in his entourage — not because there was anything intrinsic or valuable about very short men, but just because it was rare. The first guy did it to show that he was a big enough deal to have something expensive and hard to find, and then everybody else started doing it because it was the thing to do. (When dwarfs became too commonplace, the status symbols got weirder.) I think model phenotype is a little bit like that — desirable because it is rare, and because gathering and showcasing all these rare objects is a way to demonstrate your wealth and power.

By the way, the fact that models are beautiful in a highly specific way, and that there exist women who are similarly beautiful but condemned to be “civilians,” is a good reminder of the dangers of doing too much principal component analysis.⁵ In so many areas of life, we are obsessed with collapsing intrinsically high-dimensional phenomena onto a single uni-dimensional axis. You see this a lot with the status games that leftists play around privilege and oppression — I feel like a rational leftist would say that a disabled white lesbian and a wealthy scion of Haitian oligarchs are just incomparable, each more privileged than the other in some senses and less in other senses. But no, instead there’s an insistence that we find an absolute total ordering of oppression across all identity categories, a single hierarchy that allows us to compare any two individuals and produce a mathematical answer as to which one is more deserving of DEI grants. My hunch is a lot of the internal tensions and bickering within American leftism are actually produced by this insistence, which makes sense because it’s totally zero sum.

But the disease of trying to pin everything to a single number is hardly confined to the left. You see it on the right in the obsession with IQ, as if a single number could capture the breathtaking range of variation of cognitive capabilities across all humanity. I mean for goodness sake, Intel learned the hard way that this doesn’t even work for computers, and human brains are much weirder and more complicated than microprocessors. But the even dumber version of this is the 1-10 scale of female beauty. There’s something so sublime about seeing a beautiful human being, because so much of it is either bound up in subtle interrelationships between different features (this is why plastic surgery often makes people uglier — there’s no such thing as a “perfect nose,” and if you pick one out of a catalog you’ll probably end up with one that doesn’t fit your face), or it’s irretrievably evanescent — a fleeting glance, or the way her hair falls across her face just so, gone the moment after it happens. Taking something so ineffable and putting it on a 1-10 scale only makes sense as a form of psychological warfare. And I get it, amongst the young people relations between the sexes have degenerated to the point of more or less open warfare, but come on, this is pornbrained nonsense.

Speaking of both the DEI olympics and the classification of female beauty, some parts of this book are really charmingly naive, and I snickered a bit at Mears’s mystification at why all of the models are white and blonde. The really funny part is that she says something like: “I expected this legacy of white supremacy to be in retreat given that so many of the big spenders in clubs these days are from Asia and the Middle East.” Is she really not aware that men of other races have an even stronger aesthetic preference for white women than white men do?⁶ Anyway, would you like to talk a bit about how the promoters get the models into these clubs? I think it has a lot to do with your research on obfuscated exchange.

Gabriel: Yeah, thanks for asking about the obfuscation angle. We have discussed potlatch a lot so far but obfuscated exchange is one of my two major research interests, and it’s what first got me really interested in Ashley's work.⁷ At some level the fundamental nature of the interaction is that rich men are paying for models to hang out with them, yet that rarely happens directly. Instead there are multiple ways in which the nature of this transaction is obfuscated. And note, it’s not because anything about bottle service is illegal, because it ain’t. Unlike prostitution, there are no laws against paying for arm candy, it’s just that it’s seen as extremely tacky and kind of a desperate move.

At this point, it’s worth digressing from Ashley’s work and laying out my own theory of obfuscated exchange before showing how Ashley applies the model to her data.⁸ So the starting point is to recognize that there are certain goods and services that may be more or less OK if you get them for free, but are gross, shameful, and/or illegal if you pay for them. For instance, payment transforms casual sex into prostitution and constituent service into bribery. 

Now suppose you’re someone who has money, and who really wants to have no-strings sex with someone who isn’t really attracted to you, or to get a government service that the legislator or bureaucrat thinks you're not entitled to. One way to handle this is you just do it anyway and break the taboo: you hire the prostitute or bribe the public official. Another way is you don’t do it: you think something like “I would gladly pay $200 for sex or $10,000 to get this zoning exemption, but that would be wrong and so I’m not doing it.” But what I find really interesting is when you find a way to have your cake and eat it too by buying the non-market good while obfuscating that you paid for it, hence obfuscated exchange.

In my 2014 Sociological Theory paper, I outline three forms of obfuscation:

• Gift exchange — I give you a gift and at some point in the future you give me a gift. There is a continuous tension between whether the gifts are traded for each other or are both expressions of a relationship.⁹ This ambiguity effectively allows gift exchange to trade goods that it would be immoral to directly exchange for one another. The classic example is that the difference between a sugar baby/sugar daddy relationship and a prostitute/john relationship is gift exchange vs cash on the barrelhead.

• Bundling — You and I engage in some type of innocuous commercial transaction, but we also have a relationship involving things that ought not to be sold. The classic example is a boss having sex with his worker, or a lawyer with his client.¹⁰ Is this just that two people with a business relationship also find one another irresistible, or is it quid pro quo sexual harassment? Interpreted as bundling, it is the latter, and there are some cases where it’s obviously little more than money laundering (as with the Congressman who went to prison for selling his house to a defense contractor, who immediately resold the house at a substantial loss).

• Brokerage — I hire someone to help me acquire something, and they pay the person I need it from, who then gives it to me. A majority of settlements under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act look like this: AmericaCo is doing business in Corruptistan and hires LocalFixer who in turn just bribes PublicOfficial.  

After that first paper, I introduced a fourth type, “pawning,” which is when an explicit debt is forgiven in exchange for a non-market good. This is how the mob gets gambling addicts to serve as co-conspirators in embezzlement and robbery. However Ashley didn't find any pawning to speak of in her ethnography.

So back to Ashley, one of the things I love about her ethnography is you see three different obfuscation structures all at once. Again, at a fundamental level, what is happening is rich guys are paying for models to hang out with them, but not explicitly. Let’s start with the rich guys and work towards the models. What it says on the $30,000 credit card receipt is “champagne” or “vodka.” In theory the arm candy is incidental, even though that's why the guys aren't spending much less at BevMo and getting drunk in their hotel room. So the arm candy is bundled with the alcohol. 

We might then think, OK, so the club provides the models, and in a sense they do, but the club doesn’t do this directly. Instead it pays a commission to night club promoters who arrange that the models be there in exchange for a commission on the table's check. So the promoters act as brokers between the club and the models.

Now we might be thinking, OK, so the promoter gets a cut of the check and out of that he pays the models. Nope. As a rule promoters don’t pay models, and when they do it is widely seen as a death spiral desperation move. Rather, promoters recruit models through gift exchange. For reasons discussed in Ashley's first book, models are constantly short on cash, and promoters will hang out in fashion districts looking for models who they can offer favors to and befriend. For instance, she talks about promoters who will drive SUVs around Manhattan offering models rides. A common pattern is to meet a group of models, identify the most popular girl in the clique, seduce her, and then get her to constantly mobilize her girlfriends to help you get paid by staying out until 4am, even though this means that they are so tired and hungover the next day that they miss their own auditions and photoshoots.

There is more than a little resemblance between the promoters and pimps. Aside from the vast moral difference that these guys don't commit felonies and aren't hyper-misogynists, they all come across as like Andrew Tate with their peacocking, their hustle mindsets, and the basic fact that their livelihood is based on leveraging their own charm into mobilizing pretty girls into making money for them from other men.

John: When I was reading about the promoters, the first thing I thought of was enterprise sales. Talk about obfuscated exchange, any competent salesman — especially one selling something expensive,¹¹ especially especially something that’s both expensive and recurring — is frequently wining and dining his clients, doing them little favors, etc. But it’s vital both to the self image of everybody involved and to the company’s ethics policy that none of this veer into the world of explicit quid pro quo.

Actually, it shouldn’t even be implicit! Done right, the client is not thinking to himself “if I don’t renew I’ll no longer get a nice dinner once every six months,” instead he just feels a very natural human friendliness towards the nice guy who buys him dinner and pays attention to him and laughs at all his jokes. Perhaps he even feels a little bit of an obligation. “Man, this guy has done me so many favors, I really owe him one in return. I’ll go to bat in the budget committee.” Sometimes the friendliness and appreciation is actually totally genuine on both sides. People who start out using each other for economic reasons end up as genuine friends. And sometimes that, too, is by design…

Anyway, I think something like this is happening with the promoters and the models, the promoters and the club owners, the models and the rich guys, the promoters and the rich guys… Heck, it happens between you and the staff at a barbershop or restaurant where you’re a regular. Sometimes a gift exchange is an obfuscated exchange, sometimes it’s meant to curry favor for the future, sometimes it’s an innocent friendly gesture, and sometimes it starts out as one of those things and turns into another as the relationship develops. The boundary between economic and non-economic activity is wonderfully murky, and I think this ambiguity injects a lot of delightful energy into “casual” social encounters with acquaintances. It’s another reason to hate the scourge of autists who want to bring everything into the market or make everything explicit.

Gabriel: Enterprise sales, or b2b sales in general, are a great context for understanding both extravagance and obfuscated exchange. There’s a personal connection for me in that I first got interested in obfuscated exchange through the issue of radio promotion, which is effectively a form of b2b sales. My radio book is mostly about how fast songs become hits, but one chapter of it is on payola. As I read the subpoenaed documents about payola from the late 1990s and early aughts, I noticed that very few of them were overt quid pro quos. Rather, the typical exchange was the record label, or a consultant acting on behalf of the record label, doing favors for radio stations. “Hey, you need concert tickets for your station promotion?” “Do you need anyone to cover the staff dinner for your Christmas party?” And then at some point the label/consultant calls in the favors: “Hey, we're really trying to launch this artist, do you think you can help us out by adding them to your playlist?” This reminded me of the economic sociology course I took in grad school with Zelizer and turned into an entire research project in its own right. And you don't know how right you are in your footnote to flag pharma detailing as another realm of b2b sales that are completely structured by obfuscation. Marissa King and her co-authors have a couple papers on how gift bans mean doctors will still prescribe new drugs if they actually work, but no longer prescribe new drugs that are no more effective than generics.¹²

More directly related to the book, sometimes bottle service is business hospitality, with the bankers taking out the client who is about to IPO or whatever. This raises the issue of what is considered an appropriate repertoire of business hospitality in different fields. The sheer diversity of norms and expectations is fascinating. After one of my diffusion articles came out, someone in a marketing field called me up to pick my brain and we had a great conversation but one thing that struck me was he mentioned that he always takes clients to strip clubs and he said it the same way you or I might say “I always use Markdown to write the first draft of a document.” I get it that this is a thing, but it's so thoroughly contrary to both my personal inclinations and the culture of my industry¹³ that it never stops being weird to me that in some fields it's almost expected business hospitality.

Another talented ethnographer, Kimberly Hoang, has done good work on even more extreme forms of business hospitality in Asia. In both her first and second book, Hoang discusses the role of prostitution in Vietnamese business hospitality. In the second book she notes that prostitution as business hospitality isn’t just showing the partner a good time so they’ll reciprocate with a favorable contract, but serves as “mutual hostage-taking” to seal contracts that would otherwise be unenforceable (since they involve corruption). If you and I form a corrupt bargain and then we get drunk and have an orgy with some prostitutes, this creates blackmail material should one of us try to back out, and therefore keeps us both committed to the deal.  

Where showing someone a good time ends and mutual hostage-taking begins is tricky. For instance, it seems that Fat Leonard was really good at showing half the officers in the US and Australian navies a luxurious and sleazy good time.¹⁴ But at some level once they’d accepted they had to have known that he owned them and if they ever tried to back out, there could be trouble.

John: Socrates, what is a good time? I think my biggest revelation from this book, but it really shouldn’t have been one, is that elite partying is drowning under the same awful gray tide of sameness that’s consuming everything else in the world. Mears puts it very succinctly: “For a place that seems to be about spontaneous fun, a club is a highly regimented space, one that provides scripts for wasteful behaviors to unfold in patterned ways, from Miami to Cannes.”

That’s actually a double-barreled sentence: its first point is that the “crazy” fun of a nightclub is actually as heavily ritualized and choreographed as a Beijing opera. That doesn’t have to be a knock! Some rituals are very fun indeed! But there’s something creepy and dreadful about the way Mears describes ritual wearing the mask of spontaneity. Her first time out partying at a VIP club in Miami, the night reaches a climax and suddenly she and the girls are dancing on the furniture! Wow, what wild abandon! But the next time, and the next time, and the next time, they are also dancing on the furniture, at an eerily similar time in the evening, and she begins to notice how the lighting and the music are cueing them that it’s time to dance on the furniture. The dancing takes on a rote, obligatory character, like the joyless standing ovations that audiences give at even a mediocre performance, now that all the life and specialness have been sucked out of standing ovations. Everything at a nightclub is kind of like that, robotic mechanism masquerading as spontaneity.

But the second, and to me deeper, horror is that the nightclub ritual has colonized every city with an international airport. Say what you like about the tenets of kabuki theater, Dude, at least you have to go to Japan to see it. But elite partying has become the same the world over. Go anywhere on earth that has tourist brochures, and those brochures will have a panel called “nightlife” — you know, right between the “arts district” and the “riverwalk” — and that “nightlife” is the same. Even the stock images they use to advertise it in the tourist pamphlet are the same. I used to think this was only true of “elite” partying with scare quotes, the lame and aspirational nightclubs that imitate the real thing. But no, the places that charge you $10,000 per bottle are also the same everywhere — from Ibiza to Miami, St. Tropez to Cannes. The superyacht set are also going through the same mechanical motions, spreading the bland uniformity everywhere they go like some horrifically boring version of King Midas. I like to think that if I had that much money, I’d do something interesting with it. Maybe I’m just kidding myself.

1. Gladatorial ludi were originally funerary in nature. And we know from the Lex Fufia Caninia that by 2 BC funerary manumission was considered to be in such an escalatory spiral that it would ruin estates absent sumptuary laws limiting the practice.

2. Another example of garbage as testament to the host’s opulent generosity is the “unswept floor” mosaic motif common to many Hellenistic and Roman triclinia.

3. Another interesting work of scholarship on partying is Minjae Kim’s work on Korean work team binge drinking. Minjae shows that people go binge drinking because most of them hate it and thus it serves as a costly signal of loyalty.

4. In fact, an unusually high proportion of models are intersex individuals with a Y-chromosome and androgen insensitivity syndrome.

5. Not the only danger of too much principal component analysis!

6. Gabriel: Kimberly Hoang did an ethnography as a bar girl in several Vietnam bars. At the bar that catered to Vietnamese elites, the other bar girls made her lighten her skin with cosmetics and wear a black minidress, with the target look being tall, pale, and slender K-pop idol. When she moved to another bar catering to white sex tourists, the other bar girls told her to wear bronzer and a slutty version of traditional Asian dress with the target look being exoticized sexiness. See: Hoang, Kimberly Kay. 2015. Dealing in Desire: Asian Ascendancy, Western Decline, and the Hidden Currencies of Global Sex Work. University of California Press.

7. My other major research interest is diffusion, or how ideas and behaviors spread. This is the subject of my 2012 pop music radio book and my 2021 PNAS. The upshot of my take on diffusion is that you will be badly misled if you only pay attention to social contagion processes like word-of-mouth as it's critical to consider the constant hazard (eg, advertising, government mandates, or the legitimacy that comes with a mature product category).

Rossman, Gabriel. 2012. Climbing the Charts. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. https://www.google.com/books/edition/Climbing_the_Charts/E_37GZumy50C?hl=en

Rossman, Gabriel, and Jacob C. Fisher. 2021. “Network Hubs Cease to Be Influential in the Presence of Low Levels of Advertising.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 118(7). https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2013391118

8. Rossman, Gabriel. 2014. “Obfuscatory Relational Work and Disreputable Exchange.” Sociological Theory 32(1):43–63. https://www.chapman.edu/research/institutes-and-centers/economic-science-institute/_files/ifree-papers-and-photos/obfuscatory-relational-work-and-disreputable-exchange.pdf

Rossman, Gabriel, Michael Munger, Alan Fiske, and Alex Tabarrok. 2016. "The Exchanges We Hide." Cato Unbound. https://www.cato-unbound.org/issues/june-2016/exchanges-we-hide/

Schilke, Oliver, and Gabriel Rossman. 2018. “It’s Only Wrong If It’s Transactional: Moral Perceptions of Obfuscated Exchange.” American Sociological Review 83:1079–1107. https://www.oliverschilke.com/fileadmin/pdf/Schilke__Rossman._It_s_Only_Wrong_If_It_s_Transactional_-_Moral_Perceptions_of_Obfuscated_Exchange.pdf

Schilke, Oliver, and Gabriel Rossman. forthcoming. “Honor among crooks: the role of trust in obfuscated disreputable exchange.” American Sociological Review https://osf.io/6b793/

9. Bourdieu, Pierre. 2000. Pascalian Meditations. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. especially "Twofold Truth of the Gift"

10. Zelizer, Viviana A. 2005. The Purchase of Intimacy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

11. But it happens downmarket too! When I was a kid I interned in a hospital, and everybody always got excited when the pharmaceutical reps came by because part of their modus operandi was to bring lunch for all the staff. This is an especially interesting one because we obviously had no input into the decisions around what drugs or devices to buy, but a good salesman leaves nothing to chance. Even creating a congenial and happy atmosphere around the buyer was worth a few trays of sandwiches and cookies.

12. King, Marissa, and Peter S. Bearman. 2017. “Gifts and Influence: Conflict of Interest Policies and Prescribing of Psychotropic Medications in the United States.” Social Science & Medicine 172:153–62. doi: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5154797/

King, M., C. Essick, P. Bearman, and J. S. Ross. 2013. “Medical School Gift Restriction Policies and Physician Prescribing of Newly Marketed Psychotropic Medications: Difference-in-Differences Analysis.” BMJ 346(jan30 5):f264–f264. doi: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3623604/

13. Academic business hospitality for either an invited lecture or a flyout (on-site job interview) goes like this: you Uber to the hotel and have dinner alone. The next morning you have breakfast with the department chair and then a series of one-on-one meetings with faculty and lunch with a few of the faculty, then you have coffee and pastry with the grad students, give a lecture in the afternoon, take a one hour break, and then one of the faculty picks you up and takes you to a tasteful restaurant where several colleagues are meeting you, entrees are in the $20-$40 range, and you share one $50 bottle of wine between 4 people. The next morning you have a couple more meetings then go home. That’s our custom, it’s what the university reimburses for, and we all enjoy it. The thought that the host faculty member would say after dinner “instead of dropping you off at the hotel across the street from the university, how about we go to a strip club” is just something that would not happen. There’s not even a script for how to respond (do you go to be polite? laugh it off awkwardly? call the DEI / Title IX office?) for the simple reason that it’s as unthinkable that any academic would suggest this as it would be that they suggest the collegial dinner be making bologna sandwiches in the parking lot of a grocery store.

14. You may be asking, how good of a time could Fat Leonard possibly have provided. Suffice it to say that the Justice Department included in its charges against the XO for the 7th fleet that he used Douglas MacArthur memorabilia to commit sex acts with prostitutes.