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.

From Passive Overeating to “Food Addiction”: A Spectrum of Compulsion and Severity

“…Substance abuse is a relatively recent phenomenon in the history of our species and occurs largely because we learned to purify and synthesize potent drugs from plant materials and because their routes of administration to the brain have become more direct [64, 65]. In other words, it is the concentrated doses of these substances, and their ubiquity, that have contributed to wide-spread human drug addictions.…”

Incentivizing Vegetable Consumption in School‐Aged Children: Evidence from a Field Experiment

“…The nutritional quality of children's diet is important not only because it can have significant health consequences (i.e., increased disease risk; WHO ), but also because it can hamper cognitive development and educational achievements (e.g., scholastic performance; Lambert et al ; Belot and James ; Hoy and Childres ; Ishdorj, Mary Kay, and Jensen ; Black, Johnston, and Peeters ). Furthermore, food consumption patterns during childhood play a crucial role in determining the well‐being of individuals in the long run given that eating habits are developed at an early age and tend to persist throughout adulthood (Raju, Rajagopal, and Gilbride ; Smith and Tasnadi ).…”

Why Are Americans Addicted to Baseball? An Empirical Analysis of Fandom in Korea and the United States

“…Our approach, therefore, will be to take a step back and look more broadly at what the scientific literature has to say about the human phenomenon of spectator sports. In this enterprise, we follow Smith and Tasnádi (2007), who studied the problem of habit formation in dietary preferences. In addition to showing that the process of Bayesian learning can generate adjacent complementarity in an optimal foraging framework, the authors provide a review and synthesis of the biomedical literature as it relates to the neuroscience of dietary habits and drugs of addiction.…”

“…The take‐home lessons from Smith and Tasnádi (2007) are that (a) habit formation has something to do with learning or the evolutionary vestiges of learning and (b) one method of verifying naturalistic explanations for habit formation (and thus pointing the way to a theory of endogenous habit formation) is to identify the natural function of the neuroendocrine systems underlying the behavior in question. In particular, once the natural function of a neuroendocrine system has been identified, it can be interpreted as a physiological indicator of an internal information state , where information is taken to be subjective 14…”

“…We believe that our empirical findings are suggestive of a broader theory of habit formation among sports fans. Therefore, after presenting our results, we sketch this theory, which follows the approach developed by Smith and Tasnádi (2007), who developed a theory of habit formation with respect to dietary choice. Smith and Tasnádi pursued what might be called a “naturalistic” approach to formulating a theory of consumer behavior, in that they begin by asking what optimal dietary preferences would have looked like in the preindustrial world (i.e., the environment in which humans presumably evolved).…”