James Hurman, a 30-year-old man from Auckland, N.Z., is selling his smoking habit to the highest bidder. (Apparently, he hasn’t run across StickK, or been offered a 0 percent interest bank account to quit.)
Here’s what Hurman has to say for himself:
I’ve smoked cigarettes for twelve years and I’ve tried all the usual ways to quit smoking. Now that my wife Annabel and I are pregnant with our first child, it’s time to give up once and for all.
I’ve created a listing on the New Zealand online auction site trademe.co.nz, and on Monday 31 March, 2008, the highest bidder will receive a contract written by my lawyer, Chris Hoquard at Dominion Law, in which I hand over my right to smoke to them, and agree to pay them a forfeit of NZ$1000.00 [about $800 USD] per cigarette that I smoke at any time following the auction’s closure.
As far as I know, this is the first time somebody has sold their smoking habit.
I will donate the proceeds from the auction to the Cancer Society of New Zealand.
Assuming this is not a hoax — after George Fox, who can you trust? — it’s an interesting exercise, although it’s unclear to me how a violation of the contract can be verified other than Hurman’s self-admission. But even if the auction per se were to fail as a commitment device, I would think Hurman’s very public announcement of his quitting smoking might do the trick.
(Hat tip: James Barrington.)
and 
. You can also watch it on 
Does the other guy have to smoke all the cigarettes that he was smoking?
I’m not convinced by all these different ‘commitment devices’. Essentially they all reinforce this premise that ‘I really want to keep smoking, so I need some incentive to stop’. In truth, every smoker is well aware of numerous incentives to give up, so why will one more more a difference?
So, it could cost me $1000 per cigarette or I could make me, my wife, and/or my new baby sick. Hmmm, let me think about which of these provides a disincentive to smoke…
So he can smoke all the cigars he wants??
I guess in this way you have dual advantage working for you ……….. First thing is that you will strive to get rid of the habbit & second you will have a good fortune ready for your child
…….:)
Michael Feldman had a similar idea last year on his radio show “Whadya Know,” which was inspired’ I think, by the idea of carbon trading. People called in with a skill, such as piano playing, and would offer to trade that for something they wanted to do, but couldn’t, such as quitting smoking or losing weight.
Stuart,
Humans are incredibly bad at managing behaviors with long-term consequences. As a psychological economist whose research focuses on addiction and savings behaviors, I teach my students about the importance of commitment devices.
Our brains focus tremendously on the short-term, but show great patience in the plans we make for the future. One problem is that when the future rolls around, it becomes the present, and we succumb to a short-term bias to heavily prefer the present–UNLESS our planning self has locked us into the patient course of action. Another problem is that there’s not a whole lot of cost to smoking just one more cigarette, so we can always plan to quit “tomorrow.” Only “tomorrow” never quite manages to arrive–unless we’ve tied our hands.
I’ll give you two empirical examples.
First, one of the most successful addiction treatments (at least in the short-term) is a method called “contingency management,” developed by Steven Higgins and others at the University of Vermont. Patients in this program undergo regular drug testing for the specific drug being treated (cocaine being the most common). The program pays the patients for every negative drug test, with the amount keyed to the number of sequential negative drug tests they’ve had (so a positive test not only costs them one payment, but makes all the subsequent payments smaller). This way, there’s a very real, short-term cost to smoking this next cigarette.
For another example, Dan Ariely and Klaus Wertenbroch at MIT once took a class taught in 3 sections and randomly varied each section’s homework policy. The class had 3 major assignments, and the profs didn’t give feedback on any of the assignments. They gave one section very firm deadlines that were evenly spaced throughout the term. They gave one section no deadline other than to hand in all three assignments by the end of the term. And they gave the third section the chance at the beginning of the term to commit themselves to any deadlines they wanted (including the end of the term), and then enforced those deadlines.
Fully rational, far-sighted students with no deadline would have planned ahead and completed the assignments over the course of the term, calculating the optimal moments to do them. Unsurprisingly, the students failed to do this. The students in the no deadline group, or in the choice group who didn’t set deadlines, turned in their work all at the last minute and did quite poorly. Students with evenly spaced deadlines did much better, even beating out the students who did set their own deadlines but didn’t space them out as much.
Short-term deadlines and consequences are vastly more powerful than dramatic long-term consequences. “Willpower” is a sucky plan. It’s very hard to change human behavior; it’s much much easier to change our environment and our incentives.
@Stephen (#15): How do I enroll in “[t]he program [that] pays the patients…”? Sounds like what I was looking for (assuming they also do nicotine testing, that is).