Schroeder Center Events

Location

Please join us for a faculty research talk by Andrew Barnes, Ph.D. on ?Informing Tobacco Product Policy through Laboratory and Field Experiments.? Dr. Barnes is an Associate Professor in the Department of Health Behavior and Policy at the Virginia Commonwealth University?s School of Medicine. He is also an Affiliate Faculty with the Center for the Study of Tobacco Products, and a Research Associate with the Cancer Prevention and Control at the Massey Cancer Center.

Economic models of demand for tobacco products play a pivotal role in assessing the efficacy of price and non-price policies aimed at internalizing the consequences of tobacco use behaviors. Such approaches typically rely on historical consumer and policy data (and assumptions about consumer and supplier behaviors) presenting challenges for predicting potential policy effects on tobacco use behavior ex ante, particularly in a tobacco market undergoing rapid innovation and differentiation. In such cases, laboratory and field experiments permit experimental examination of how an array of potential regulatory policies, sometimes operating in concert, may affect demand across or within classes of tobacco products (e.g., combustible vs. electronic cigarettes; high- vs. low-nicotine electronic cigarettes). These approaches therefore provide opportunities for a prospective analysis of the impact of tobacco policies on own- and cross-product demand.

Dr. Barnes? research team is led by a health economist and a health psychologist and has 10 ongoing or completed studies in the laboratory and in the field assessing variation in demand for combustible cigarettes, little cigars, and electronic cigarettes across a number of potential policy conditions (regulating flavor availability, nicotine content, electronic cigarette device characteristics, and/or advertising) and across populations of youth (ages 12-17), young adults (18-25), and all adults (18+). In these studies, modified versions of the Cigarette Purchase Task (CPT) and/or Multiple Choice Procedure (MCP) are administered. These choice tasks elicit several outcomes of economic importance including elasticities (own price and cross price), demand curves, and willingness to pay thresholds. The two choice tasks differ in the economic parameters they recover and whether the stated demand for a given product at a given price is reinforced after consumer choices are made.

This presentation will summarize the CPT and MCP methods Dr. Barnes? team employs in their laboratory and in the field, results from ~2,500 responses to these measures, as well as discuss the promise and pitfalls of these methods to informing tobacco policy and the field of health economics. He will also present how the team has correlated tobacco product demand assessed in the laboratory to physiological measures (heart rate, blood pressure, carbon monoxide, saliva nicotine), puff topography (volume and flow rate of tobacco product inhalation), and subjective measures of the utility derived from consumption.

Funding. This work was supported by the National Institute on Drug Abuse and the Center for Tobacco Products of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (R03DA043005; U54DA0361905), the National Cancer Institute (P30CA016059), and the Virginia Foundation for Healthy Youth (8521068; 8521236).

Dr. Barnes? faculty research talk is co-sponsored by William & Mary?s Schroeder Center for Health Policy and the Department of Economics.

Contact

Kelly Metcalf-Meese, Research Associate, Schroeder Center for Health Policy, klmetcalfmeese@wm.edu