TY - JOUR AU - Marti, Joachim AU - Buckell, John AU - Maclean, Johanna Catherine AU - Sindelar, Jody L TI - To ‘Vape’ or Smoke? A Discrete Choice Experiment Among U.S. Adult Smokers JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series VL - No. 22079 PY - 2016 Y2 - March 2016 DO - 10.3386/w22079 UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w22079 L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w22079.pdf N1 - Author contact info: Joachim Marti Institute of Social and Preventive Medicine University of Lausanne E-Mail: j.marti@imperial.ac.uk John Buckell Yale School of Public Health P.O. Box 208034 New Haven, CT 06520-8034 E-Mail: john.buckell@yale.edu Johanna Catherine Maclean Department of Economics Temple University Ritter Annex 869 Philadelphia, PA 19122 Tel: 215/204-0560 E-Mail: catherine.maclean@temple.edu Jody L. Sindelar Yale School of Public Health Yale University School of Medicine 60 College Street, P.O. Box 208034 New Haven, CT 06520-8034 Tel: 203/785-5287 Fax: 203/785-6287 E-Mail: jody.sindelar@yale.edu AB - A small but rapidly growing percentage of the U.S. population uses e-cigarettes. Policymakers, especially the FDA, are concerned about their public health impact and thus are contemplating regulations. We provide empirical evidence to inform such policy choices. Specifically, we examine how the demand for e-cigarettes would vary across policy-relevant attributes: 1) health impact, 2) effectiveness in helping smokers quit, 3) bans in public places, and 4) price. We conduct an online discrete choice experiment of 1,669 adult smokers who select among combustible cigarettes and two types of e-cigarettes as attributes are varied. Using a conditional logit model we estimate smokers’ preferences across attributes. Then, using a latent class model, we identify types of smokers and conduct policy simulations separately by these types and for the full sample. In general, smokers value the attributes in the predicted directions and the demand for e-cigarettes tends to be motivated more by smokers’ health concerns than by price or smoking bans. The latent class model identifies three types of smokers, those who prefer combustible cigarettes (‘smokers’), e-cigarettes (‘vapers’), and using both (‘dual users’). We conclude that varying these policy-relevant attributes will have small, significant impacts on average, but with substantial heterogeneity by smoker type. ER -