Job Market Paper:

Aesthetic Externalities in Nicotine Consumption: A Cause of Older Smoker E-Cigarette Non-Adoption? [Current Draft]

By virtue of their relative safety and clinical efficacy in aiding smoking cessation, e-cigarettes hold substantial potential as reduced-harm alternatives for established smokers. Yet U.S. rates of smoking-to-vaping transition remain low, particularly among older (45+) smokers. This paper proposes and tests a novel pathway contributing to this non-adoption: the aesthetic qualities of e-cigarettes themselves. Since 2019, the U.S. market has seen the rise of colorful vapes e-cigarettes featuring bright, playful designs evocative of toys. Grounded in prior marketing research, I advance the aesthetic externalities hypothesis, which posits that older smokers' negative aesthetic judgments of colorful vapes spill over to reduce their demand for all e-cigarettes, including those in plainer styles. I evaluate this hypothesis using a web-based experiment that embeds a binary visual treatment within a cigarettes-or-e-cigarettes discrete choice experiment. Treatment consists of varying the e-cigarette images shown to participants: control participants view only neutrally styled e-cigarettes, while treatment participants view these same images alongside additional images of colorful vapes. Among the older smoker participants, exposure to colorful vape images reduces the share of e-cigarette-involving choices by 27.3% relative to control. Additional results provide suggestive evidence that this demand effect operates through promoting pejorative associations between vaping and youth, rather than influencing beliefs about core properties of e-cigarettes. These findings lend support to policies that restrict colorful e-cigarette designs on the grounds that doing so may promote harm reduction among older smokers. Additionally, they demonstrate a novel form of menu-dependent utility, wherein aesthetic aversion to a subset of products depresses preferences for all products in the choice set.

Other Working Papers:

Characteristics and Correlates of Older Smokers' Experiences with E-Cigarette-Related Content on Social Media: Findings from a U.S.-Based Survey [Current Draft]

Background: Despite their potential to serve as a reduced-harm alternative to combustible tobacco, e-cigarette take-up remains low among older (45+) adult smokers, especially in the U.S. While social media is a known driver of vaping attitudes and behaviors in younger populations, its influence on older smokers is poorly understood. This paper provides the first focused analysis of e-cigarette-related social media exposure in this population, documenting its prevalence, characteristics, and attitudinal correlates. 

Methods: Data come from an opt-in survey of U.S. adults N=974 recruited via Prolific, comprising three groups: (i) non-vaping smokers aged 45+ N=484, (ii) former-smoking vapers aged 45+ N=149, and (iii) any-vaping-status smokers aged 18-35 N=341. Descriptive statistics, weighted to U.S. population benchmarks, characterize self-reported exposure to e-cigarette-related content on social media. Logistic regressions estimate associations between exposure and intentions for future e-cigarette use, e-cigarette harm perceptions, and related attitudes. 

Results: Older smokers (35.2%) were significantly less likely than both older vapers (44.4%) and younger smokers (71.9%) to report exposure to e-cigarette-related content on social media. For older smokers, e-cigarette health risks were the most frequently reported topic of content viewed, followed by youth vaping and e-cigarette addiction. Among this group, exposure was positively associated with stated preferences for future e-cigarette use. Exposure was not significantly associated with e-cigarette harm perceptions for any group.

Conclusions: Findings provide suggestive evidence that social media exposure may promote e-cigarette adoption among older smokers. However, the cross-sectional design limits causal inference, and the observed associations may reflect selection bias or reverse causality. If a causal relationship exists, the patterns observed suggest that exposure influences e-cigarette adoption through mechanisms other than updating beliefs about e-cigarette risks. While these results tentatively support the potential of social media as a channel for older-smoker harm reduction, any policy applications must carefully weigh privacy concerns and risks to youth. Rigorous experimental studies are needed to confirm these findings and clarify how social media might be leveraged to improve public health outcomes among older smokers.

Will Smokers Go Very Low? A Volumetric Choice Experiment with Very-Low-Nicotine Cigarettes (joint with Don Kenkel, Alan Mathios, Jacob Meyer, Joseph Terza, and Hua Wang) [Draft and Abstract Forthcoming]