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An Empirical Study Of Rational Addiction: The Effects Of Quitting Aids On Smoking Cessation, Cade White

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

This paper explores the relationship between the use of quitting aids and smoking cessation using United States (US) survey data from the 2018-2019 Tobacco Use Supplement to the Current Population Survey (TUS-CPS). Becker and Murphy’s (1988) theory of rational addiction implies that strong rational addictions must terminate abruptly. In other words, strong addictions only cease by the user quitting “cold turkey”. I empirically test this hypothesis using a “double-hurdle” approach, outlined by Jones (1994). A smoker’s decision to quit and their conditional quitting success is modeled in two stages. In the first stage, a probit model is estimated for their …