IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hhs/oslohe/2008_007.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Rational addiction theory – a survey of opinions

Author

Listed:
  • Melberg, Hans Olav

    (Institute of Health Management and Health Economics)

Abstract

This paper reports briefly on some of the results from a survey of academics who have written about the theory of rational addiction. The topic is important in itself because if the literature is viewed by its participants as an intellectual game, then policy makers should be aware of this so as not to derive actual policy from toy models. More generally, the answers shed light on the nature of economics and how many economists think about model building, evidence requirements and the policy relevance of their work. A majority of the respondents believe the literature is a success story that demonstrates the power of economic reasoning. At the same time they also believe the empirical evidence to be weak, and they disagree both on the type of evidence that would validate the theory and the policy implications. Taken together this points to an interesting gap. On the one hand most of the respondents claim that the theory has valuable real-world implications. On the other hand they do not believe the theory has received empirical support.

Suggested Citation

  • Melberg, Hans Olav, 2009. "Rational addiction theory – a survey of opinions," HERO Online Working Paper Series 2008:7, University of Oslo, Health Economics Research Programme.
    • Handle: RePEc:hhs:oslohe:2008_007
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.hero.uio.no/publicat/2008/2008_7.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

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


    Cited by:

    1. Sophie Massin, 2011. "La notion d'addiction en économie : La théorie du choix rationnel à l'épreuve," Revue d'économie politique, Dalloz, vol. 121(5), pages 713-750.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Rational addiction theory; survey of opinions of economists; disagreement on evidence criteria and interpretation of evidence;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • I10 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Health - - - General

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    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:hhs:oslohe:2008_007. 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: Kristi Brinkmann Lenander (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/heuiono.html .

    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.