IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hal/journl/hal-00715481.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Nudging Smokers - The Behavioural Turn of Tobacco Risk Regulation

Author

Listed:
  • Alberto Alemanno

    (GREGH - Groupement de Recherche et d'Etudes en Gestion à HEC - HEC Paris - Ecole des Hautes Etudes Commerciales - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique)

Abstract

At a time when policy makers want to change the behaviour of citizens to tackle a broad range of social problems, such as climate change, excessive drinking, obesity and crime, a promising new policy approach has appeared that seems capable of escaping the liberal reservations typically associated with all forms of regulatory action. After having relied on the assumption that governments can only change people's behaviour through rules and regulations, policy makers now seem ready to design policies that better reflect how people really behave, not how they are assumed to behave as rational agents. The approach, which stems from the increasingly ubiquitous findings of behavioural research, is generally captured under the evocative concept of 'nudge'. Inspired by 'libertarian paternalism', it suggests that the goal of public policies should be to steer citizens towards making positive decisions as individuals and for society while preserving individual choice. This contribution aims at critically examining the application of nudging approaches to the current efforts of regulating lifestyle choices, such as tobacco use, excessive use of alcohol, unhealthy diets and lack of physical exercise. In particular, it discusses the viability of nudges approaches as applied to current tobacco control policies. After providing an account of the range of tobacco control policy tools that have developed over time, the article discusses the regulatory philosophy currently underlying anti-tobacco efforts by focusing on the mainstream concept of 'de-normalisation.' It then illustrates how most of the policies aimed at de-normalising tobacco today rely on 'nudging' approaches via behavioural change rather than via the provision of information. It finally argues that - due to the actual approach towards tobacco - most of the flaws generally identified with this alternative regulatory approach seem overcome in the context of tobacco control. However, despite its potential for providing a philosophical base justifying the current 'permit but discourage' approach typical of tobacco control and other lifestyle policies, it cannot be ruled out that 'nudging' might encounter some of the same obstacles it faces in other less contentious areas of policy-making.

Suggested Citation

  • Alberto Alemanno, 2012. "Nudging Smokers - The Behavioural Turn of Tobacco Risk Regulation," Post-Print hal-00715481, HAL.
  • Handle: RePEc:hal:journl:hal-00715481
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Sartzetakis, Eftichios & Xepapadeas, Anastasios & Yannacopoulos, Athanasios N., 2023. "Environmental regulation with preferences for social status," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 209(C).
    2. Nikil Mukerji & Adriano Mannino, 2023. "Nudge Me If You Can! Why Order Ethicists Should Embrace the Nudge Approach," Journal of Business Ethics, Springer, vol. 186(2), pages 309-324, August.
    3. Wood, Matthew & Wood, Chantelle & Styring, Peter & Jones, Christopher R. & Smith, Jeffery K. & Day, Marianne & Chakraborty, Rohit & Mensah, Gloria, 2023. "Perceptions of accountability and trust in the regulatory governance of wood burning stove sustainability: Survey evidence from the post-Brexit UK," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 177(C).
    4. Ren, Yanjun & Castro Campos, Bente & Loy, Jens-Peter & Wang, Xiaobing, 2020. "Start Smoking Earlier, Smoke More: Does Education Matter?," 2020 Annual Meeting, July 26-28, Kansas City, Missouri 304237, Agricultural and Applied Economics Association.
    5. Vivienne Byers & Alan Gilmer, 2021. "The Challenge of Sustainable Consumption for Governance and Policy Development—A Systematic Review," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 13(12), pages 1-21, June.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:hal:journl:hal-00715481. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: CCSD (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.