A Theory of Natural Addiction

Abstract

Economic theories of rational addiction aim to describe consumer behavior in the presence of habit-forming goods. We provide a biological foundation for this body of work by formally specifying conditions under which it is optimal to form a habit. We demonstrate the empirical validity of our thesis with an in-depth review and synthesis of the biomedical literature concerning the action of opiates in the mammalian brain and their effects on behavior. Our results lend credence to many of the unconventional behavioral assumptions employed by theories of rational addiction, including adjacent complementarity and the importance of cues, attention, and self-control in determining the behavior of addicts. Our approach suggests, however, that addiction is "harmful" only when the addict fails to implement the optimal solution. We offer evidence for the special case of the opiates that harmful addiction is the manifestation of a mismatch between behavioral algorithms encoded in the human genome and the expanded menu of choices-generated for example, by advances in drug delivery technology-faced by consumers in the modern world.

On the causes and consequences of hedonic adaptation

“…23 There are other more important evolutionary reasons why Nature would choose cue-consumption instead of just mean-reverting utility: e.g. Smith and Tasnádi (2007). Likewise, consumption of other individuals in the group can be used to form a benchmark: if c p denotes the mean consumption among the peers, then…”

ALL FOODS ARE HABIT‐FORMING – WHAT I WANT TO KNOW IS WHICH WILL KILL ME!

“…It can be argued that today's highly processed mass-marketed foods have been (perhaps unintentionally) designed to induce a biological addiction event. However, the reason industry methods succeed so persistently is that they take advantage of evolved predilections that served important adaptive purposes in the preindustrial world, and probably still do [6,7]. There is every reason to expect that people also become 'addicted'-in both the physiological and behavioral senses of the word-to any delicious food (healthy or not), experienced in the right context.…”

Why (and When) are Preferences Convex? Threshold Effects and Uncertain Quality

“…Our starting point for this investigation is the problem studied by Smith and Tasnádi (2007) in the context of dietary habit formation. The setting was as follows: an individual chooses a bundle of two foods with uncertain concentrations of some limiting micronutrient.…”

“…Moreover, the indifference curves that describe his preferences on R Proof. The utility function for Case 1 has been derived in a more general setting in Smith and Tasnádi (2007).…”

“…6 This "evolutionary mismatch" problem arises in part because human culture, technology, and living conditions change more rapidly than innate "preferences" encoded in the human genome. Smith and Tasnádi (2007) model this mismatch explicitly-in distinguishing "beneficial" from "harmful" addictions-by positing that while in the former case an objective optimum is obtained, in the latter the consumer maximizes a "subjective function" based on demonstrably false beliefs about risky outcomes.…”