On the motivations for the dual-use of electronic and traditional cigarettes

ABSTRACT

We apply a classical economic categorization of preferences to identify the motivations of dual-users of electronic and traditional cigarettes. The responses of 2406 US adults (including 413 dual-users) in 2015 were collected using a novel online survey along with a follow-up in 2016 of 143 of these adults (68 dual-users). A sizeable minority of 37% of dual-users reported viewing electronic and conventional cigarettes primarily as complements. Of those who had never smoked or used electronic cigarettes, only 27% thought the complementarity motive would be primary. Dual-user motivations were associated with quit-attempt, cessation methods, gender and age. 1 year on, there was a positive relationship between the level of complementarity in the dual-user’s motives and their change in self-reported traditional cigarette consumption. It is concluded that the application of a canonical economic classification of preferences may reveal important heterogeneities among the dual-user population.

KEYWORDS:

• Smoking
• complements
• substitutes
• dual-use
• preferences

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• I12
• I18
• D12

Acknowledgements

This paper is the sequel to Doyle et al. (2015) which provides a cost-benefit analysis of the impact of e-cigarettes based on a single survey. The surveys of the present paper were funded by the Warwick Policy Lab, University of Warwick. Ethical approval for the surveys was obtained from the Humanities and Social Sciences Research Ethics Committee at the University of Warwick on 21 November 2014 under reference 46/14-15.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplemental Material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Notes

¹ Discussion of the literature which investigates preferences using price data can be found in the Supplementary Material.

² Discussion of the extant medical survey literature; the Mturk platform and participant pool; and details of the survey we ran on it can be found in the Supplementary Material.

³ More detail, including a breakdown of respondent demographics and the transcripts of the surveys can be found in the Supplementary Material.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Warwick Policy Lab at the University of Warwick