Addiction, Demographic And Social Anomie: The Development And Application Of The Rational Addiction Model

In the middle of 1980's, most of the literatures define addiction in a habit formation. Because of its inertia, the demand of addictive products is lack of price elasticity. In history, researchers from different fields paid lots of attention on the consumption of addictive products, such as tobacco and alcohol, tried to find out the hidden reasons why people want to maintain or even develop the consumption with acknowledging the harmful substance. Somehow, rational addictive model made it became the most popular tool for addictive products consumption research. Based on this classic model, economists give the most important assumption that forward-looking consumers will have a full sight to consider consuming these products today which could have some kind of effects on the welfare they hold tomorrow. But at the same time, some economists argue that the initial assumption which people are rational could not explain the model perfectly. And later on, based on the original assumption, the time inconsistency model, or time-preference model, have been developed. The main purpose on anglicizing the behavior of consuming addictive products is to control the demand of this product, reduce the cost of both individual and the society, and increasing the social welfare. In this case, I used the "time-inconsistent" and "self-control" problem by focusing on the young people in the consumer group. Giving the survey data collected by the Chinese Statistic Bureau, the Ministry of Health in China, and the World Health Organization, I used quantitative and qualitative analysis to describe the tobacco consumption situation in China.