The Demand for Pornography

The market for pornography acquired great economic relevance in the 1970s with diffusion of the videocassette recorder, and went onto gain increasing relevance as from the 1990s, with the ICT revolution. Nonetheless, it has been totally ignored in economic investigation. The present paper focuses on the demand side of this market, with the main aim of proposing a preliminary theoretical assessment of the behaviour of pornography purchasers and its recent evolution in response to the Internet revolution. In this respect, certain contributions on hedonic adaptation have proved particularly useful, whereas addiction models have proved less useful than might have been expected.