EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

A Model of Dysfunctional Urges and Addiction with an Application to Cigarette Smoking

Jacob Glazer () and Andrew Weiss

The B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy, 2007, vol. 7, issue 1, 22

Abstract: We model economic decisions as stemming from urges. The magnitude of the urge is a function of previous consumption. Welfare gains from satisfying an urge vary with the nature of the urge. An urge is "dysfuntional" if people are willing to incur costs to stop themselves from gratifying that urge. The simple framework we develop captures the essential features of other, more complex models of addiction and problems of self control. We apply the model to analyze cigarette smoking. Our main results are that, under not implausible conditions, making cigarettes more addictive can reduce smoking and making cigarettes more harmful can improve the average health of the population.

Keywords: urges; conflicting preferences; addiction; habit formation; smoking (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2007
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.2202/1935-1682.1523 (text/html)
For access to full text, subscription to the journal or payment for the individual article is required.

Related works:
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:bpj:bejeap:v:7:y:2007:i:1:n:3

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.degruyter.com/journal/key/bejeap/html

DOI: 10.2202/1935-1682.1523

Access Statistics for this article

The B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy is currently edited by Hendrik Jürges and Sandra Ludwig

More articles in The B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy from De Gruyter
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Peter Golla ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:bpj:bejeap:v:7:y:2007:i:1:n:3