Addictive Consumption, Imperfect Substitutes and Self Control: A Model and an Application to Slot Machines

Claudio Deiana, Davide Dragone and Ludovica Giua

Working Papers from Dipartimento Scienze Economiche, Universita' di Bologna

Abstract: We propose a model of addictive consumption to study the demand for imperfect substitutes involving substances like alcohol, nicotine and opioids, as well as behavioral addictions like gambling and digital addiction. We study a 2017 Italian policy aimed at reducing gambling by limiting the number of available slot machines. Despite the reduction in slot machines, the policy produced an unintended 25% increase in net expenditure, particularly among low-wealth and low-educated individuals who also engage in other addictive behaviors. This result can be rationalized as the consequence of changes in self-control costs due to social contagion effects.

JEL-codes: I18 L43 L83 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ene, nep-env, nep-ind and nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://amsacta.unibo.it/8037/1/WP1197.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Addictive Consumption, Imperfect Substitutes and Self Control: A Model and an Application to Slot Machines (2024)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bol:bodewp:wp1197

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Dipartimento Scienze Economiche, Universita' di Bologna Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Dipartimento Scienze Economiche, Universita' di Bologna ().