Does Out-Of-Home Snacking Lead to Rational Addiction?

The rise in obesity is caused by a greater frequency of snacks consumed out-of-home and in-home. Out-of-home snacking assumes importance as our food rich environment lead us to indulge. We want to test if addiction to out-of-home snacking can explain the increase in consumption of snacks. Rational addiction theory implies that past purchase quantities can increase current purchases. Using reduced form models to test for addiction to food can yield spurious evidence; hence we use a dynamic structural model with addiction and inventory. We adapt Gordon and Sun (2013)’s model of addiction with endogenous consumption and stockpiling on individual-level consumption data. Our novel dataset reporting out-of-home consumption and total purchase of 18000 households for 196 weeks will allow us to conduct unique analyses.