Smoking: Making the Risky Decision (Hardcover)

Review
"Well written and accessible to a broad audience....The book is well worth reading for anyone interested in these topics."--Journal of Economic Literature
"A thought provoking book that will be of interest to researchers and policy makers concerned with smoking and public health."--British Medical Journal
"As much as any economist, Viscusi has undertaken the difficult task of disciplining formal models with detailed observation of actual judgements and behaviors. Smoking: Making the Risky Decision is a milestone in this long-term project, a book with theoretical and practical importance."--Baruch Fischhoff, Carnegie Mellon University
"This book combines two disciplines, cognitive psychology and the economics of risk, to make an important contribution to the smoking debate. Viscusi shows that persons in all age groups overestimate smoking risks, as theory predicts, and that persons behave rationally respecting the smoking decision given their perception of the facts. After these findings, the smoking decision can justifiably be regulated only in consequence of third party effects, not because consumers make poor health choices.--Alan Schwartz, Yale Law School
"This book has a point of view that is underrepresented in the debate over smoking policy--that the objective of public policy should not be a smoke-free society, but risk taking based on accurate information and promoting competition for safer cigarettes."--Joseph P. Newhouse, Harvard Medical School


Product Description
This is a book on smoking that uses rigorous empirical data to explore in detail the character of the tradeoffs that people make in choosing whether to smoke or not to smoke. It is, therefore, not strictly about the hazards of smoking but about how people's perceptions of the risk of smoking affects their smoking behaviour. Some of the interesting and potentially controversial conclusions include: 1) People overestimate the risk of lung cancer compared to the actual incidence of the disease; 2) if people had an accurate perception of the risk of lung cancer national smoking rates would rise by 8%; 3) excise taxes on cigarettes increase people's risk perceptions and decrease smoking rates; 4) people who smoke are more likely to accept work in hazardous professions, and require less extra compensation for hazardous work than non-smokers; 5) young people, who are making the decision whether to smoke have a higher perception of the risks of smoking than older people.

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