ABSTRACT
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) was granted authority to regulate tobacco products to benefit public health. With this authority, the FDA can regulate the amount of nicotine in tobacco products as well as a variety of other design features. An increasing array of products such as electronic cigarettes has led to an ever-more complex tobacco marketplace. Tobacco control benefiting the public health could be advanced by novel methods that permit estimates of the abuse liability of new products by current smokers and how these products may shift consumption. Behavioral economics provides methods to understand the abuse liability and the interaction among tobacco and other products. The Experimental Tobacco Marketplace (ETM) was developed, in part, to account for ever-changing product landscape and the time constraints imposed by the naturalistic assessment of demand discussed above. In this two-experiment-within-subjects study, only one alternative combustible tobacco product, cigarillos, was available in the first experiment and was not available in the second, systematic replication.
