Models of Smoking Addictions

Contents

Introduction        3

Rational Addiction        3

Imperfectly Rational Addiction        4

Myopic Addiction        4

Conclusion        5

Reference        5

Introduction

The following essay will be discussing the different models of addiction towards smoking. These addiction models include; rational addiction, imperfectly rational addiction and myopic addiction. All of these models involve consumption rates and price and how it psychologically and economically affects consumers. Smoking advertisements are used to get people to stop smoking cigarettes they have been covered on television majorly as well as on the product itself, despite its purpose to de-influence consumers from buying it, there is still a growing rate of consumers that are still purchasing it. Another strategy used by the government to reduce consumption of cigarettes is to increase the taxes on cigarettes to reduce the ongoing demand.

Rational Addiction

Rational addiction from an economical perspective is when an individual has reasoning behind the addiction and continues to feed the addiction. We are going to discuss the addiction of a cigarette smoker. The question is, is there a reason behind someone getting addicted to smoking? Is the addiction a rational choice? The only rational explanation behind smokers addiction is the more often you smoke cigarettes the more desire you have to continue the addiction. Also the tolerance of the smoker, they constantly desire more from cigarettes in larger portions rather than a smaller portion due to the past of their smoking addiction.

A rational addiction consists of an addictive capital stock. The more cigarettes a smoker consumes on a daily basis, the individual’s demand for more cigarettes will continuously increase. With previous pricing of cigarettes being ridiculously cheap, the addiction of smoking would constantly be in high demand for large quantities of cigarettes. But as the prices increased over the years, the addicts would want to maintain their consumption of cigarettes but not have the income to do so; this could lead to future problems such as being unstable financially and health issues and increasing their chances of forming cancer. Over time, the addiction can go two ways, it could either make the individual realize that the addiction is over whelming or the addiction can overcome the addict and could continue to become financially corrupted and destroy their health.

With the stock constantly decreasing in cigarettes, smokers are finding it harder to continue the addiction with the quantity rate that the individual is currently at. Over the next coming years, smokers are going to find it more difficult to both afford and obtain cigarettes when the quantity of stock goes down. The trade-off with a large consumption of cigarettes is that the addiction would become more expensive as the demand from the individual goes up. This will also mean that due to a large consumption of cigarettes this will play a big impact with body health. The longer the addiction is occurred, the worse the affects would be on an individual.

If the price of cigarettes decrease, the consumption from addicts would increase as they would be getting two packets of cigarettes for the price of one, this also means that with the demand of cigarettes getting higher the rate of addicts in general will also increase as it would be a cheap addiction to afford.

Imperfectly Rational Addiction

Imperfectly rational addiction is defined as someone that creates the addiction but in the long run wants to gain control to get rid of the habit of smoking. Thomas Schelling described someone that was trying to quit the habit of smoking as the following: “Everybody behaves like two people, one who wants clean lungs and long life and another who adores tobacco.... The two are in a continual contest for control.” (Thomas Schelling, ‘Economists and Addiction: Brief History (continued)’) The way someone with imperfectly rational addiction is described is someone in the short run grabbed the addiction of smoking but in the long run regretted the habit.