Gambling motivation and involvement: A review of social

in order to maximize utility from smoking lots of cigarettes as soon as the price has
been lowered. Conversely, a rise in price in the remote future will prompt the rational
addict to decrease his or her stock of addictive capital right away.
Myopic and rational addictions have different policy implications. Myopic addicts
act on the basis of imperfect information and utility calculus and would therefore
benefit from being educated about the adverse future consequences of being addicted.
Rational addicts are assumed to have full knowledge of what is at present known
about potential negative consequences. Educating them about the dangers of addiction
and the various ways to stop abusing is thus useless unless brand new information
is presented, for instance, from addiction or treatment research. Efforts to make
rational addicts quit are misguided, since they themselves have chosen to be addicts
and would suffer even more if they stopped using the addictive good. Policy measures
should therefore be concentrated on correcting negative externalities, such as preventing
drunken drivers from harming others by causing road accidents.
The three economic studies on gambling mentioned above [177–179], all claim
to present evidence suggesting that gambling – entering lotteries and horse betting
– is addictive and that addiction is rational. They draw this conclusion from
econometric analyses that, among other things, appear to show that gamblers react
to expected price changes in the remote future, which is the kind of price elasticity
characteristic of rational addiction. However, since the theory of rational addiction
as originally formulated and used in these studies has been subject to devastating
critique, by Elster [185] for example, these results should be viewed with great caution.
One study, for instance, tested the approach on the consumption of a variety
of consumer goods and arrived at the incredible conclusion (unless the cumbersome
notion of beneficial addiction is accepted) that milk is more addictive than cigarettes
[176]. This test thus suggests that the theory of rational addiction is flawed. That is
also the opinion of numerous scholars in the fields of addiction and gambling studies
[56], including the present author.
RELEvancE tO pRObLEm GambLinG StudiES
There is reason to assume that the theory of rational addiction is fundamentally
flawed. It is thus questionable that the theory is of any relevance to problem gambling
studies.
The leisure gambler
Leisure studies incorporate perspectives from economics, sociology, psychology,
and human geography. The focus of this multidisciplinary field of research is on
people’s leisure choices and behavior. Since people do quite a lot of different things
in their free time, the activities studied are varied, such as sports, tourism, nature
36 G A M B L I N G M O T I VAT I O N A N D I N V O LV E M E N T