Fundamentos para el análisis económico del tabaquismo: la utilidad marginal y los umbrales de asimilación

Current regulation of smoking in Spain (Law 28 /2005) defines and reallocates environmental property rights in favour of nonsmokers. From this point of view, it is important to analyze the social desirability of maximizing the utility of a category of individuals knowing that this requires the exclusion of the other category. In our analysis we consider that the ability of individuals to tolerate tobacco smoke in the environment not only depends on marginal utility (or disutility) but also on consumption thresholds about what they are willing to tolerate or perform. We find a bang bang solution switching between zero-pollution (exclusion of smokers) and maximum tobacco consumption (exclusion of nonsmokers).The paper also shows why, in the presence of compulsive smokers, the prohibition of tobacco consumption may be economically rational.