Swinger economics

Swinging is a sexual behaviour of increasing relevance but substantially ignored in theoretical economic investigation. This paper has two major goals. The first is to describe what swinging is, discuss its economic relevance and single out the main characteristics of swinger behaviour. To this end, the Italian situation has been considered as a type of case study. The second goal is to use standard and less-standard tools from economic theory to propose some preliminary assessments of the causes and consequences of swinger couples’ behaviour. In this respect, some contributions on two-sided markets, hedonic adaptation approaches and equilibrium matching models have proved particularly useful.