Rational Addiction to Cinema? A Dynamic Panel Analysis of European Countries.

A number of papers have empirically investigated the rational addiction model proposed by Becker and Murphy (1988) by using data on different harmful drugs, like cigarettes, alcohol, caffeine, opium, cocaine; but also activities independent of a biological or pharmaceutical dependency have been analysed, such as gambling, calorie consumption, news, arts, and cinema. The purpose of this paper is to extend previous works on cinema demand by using pooled cross-section and time-series data on thirteen European countries over the period 1989-2002. The estimation results provide a strong evidence that cinema consumption conforms to a rational addiction hypothesis.