ABSTRACT
Introduction This chapter focuses on two related areas in the economics of addiction. First, it considers how economists have characterized addiction, noting the relationship between these specifications and the characterizations offered by pharmacology and psychology. Second, it outlines the implications of alternative addiction models for the empirical analysis of the determinants of quitting. It should be noted throughout that while our focus is the problem of nicotine dependence, the general approaches and issues outlined are also applicable to other harmful, and possibly beneficial, addictions.
