Addiction and Present-Biased Preferences

Game Theory and Information from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: We investigate the role that self-control problems modeled as time-inconsistent, present-biased preferences and a person's awareness of those problems might play in leading people to develop and maintain harmful addictions. Present-biased preferences create a tendency to over-consume addictive products, and awareness of future self-control problems can mitigate or exacerbate this over-consumption, depending on the environment. Our central concern is the welfare consequences of this over-consumption. Our analysis suggests that for realistic environments self-control problems are a plausible source of severely harmful addictions only in conjunction with some unawareness of future self- control problems.

JEL-codes: A12 B49 C70 D11 D60 D74 D91 E21 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 53 pages
Date: 2003-03-21
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea and nep-mic
Note: 53 pages, Acrobat .pdf
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Downloads: (external link)
https://econwpa.ub.uni-muenchen.de/econ-wp/game/papers/0303/0303005.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Addiction and Present-Biased Preferences (2002)
Working Paper: Addiction and Present-Biased Preferences (2002)
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:wpa:wuwpga:0303005

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Game Theory and Information from University Library of Munich, Germany
Bibliographic data for series maintained by EconWPA ().