鈴木 亘

type:Article In a matter of just few years, Japanese public policies on smoking have changed from very permissive to very restrictive. Now, in many public places, including restaurants, offices and factories, unless effective separation of smokers are secured, smoking is prohibited. As a matter of fact, such changes are taking places everywhere in the world. Economics or economists, however, have had very little to do with them, even though these measures are expected to save hundreds of thousand lives and trillions of yen every year in Japan alone. Economist have been under the influence of what is known as "Rational Addiction" models for almost two decades, and very few actually had the courage of speaking against smoking. Not surprisingly, research outputs of RA models have been largely ignored by the scientific community in general. In view of these, what we would like to accomplish in this paper is first to survey RA models and other economic models on smoking, to examine core scientific knowledge on nicotine addiction we now have, to adequately accommodate it in the RA models, and finally to examine whether we can account for human smoking behaviors by such models.