Effects of Tobacco Abuse Liability-dependent Taxes in the ETM

Summary

In a within-subject design, cigarette smokers, stratified by age, will purchase tobacco products under three tax rate conditions based on abuse liability, that is taxes based on: (1) product category score (i.e. score ranging from 0-1 based on abuse liability effect sizes); (2) product category rank (i.e. position of a product relative to all others; e.g. 1st, 5th); and (3) product tiers (i.e. low-, medium-, high abuse liability), as well as a control. In the ETM, the effects of these interventions will be examined on cigarette demand and other products substitution.

The investigators will use a repeated-measures (within subject) analysis of variance (ANOVA) to test if there are differences between conditions (i.e., tax proposals) independently for each product. The models will include study design parameters for order effects to account for counterbalancing the tax conditions in the ETM. Each tax condition will be compared to the control. All distributional assumptions will be checked prior to analyses and the appropriate transformations will be employed, if needed. For each significant result from the omnibus test, the investigators will perform planned contrasts to test the proposed hypotheses previously described. Note that the omnibus test can result in a significant finding while the contrasts of interest may be non-significant. In this case, the investigators will only report the results from the planned contrasts.

Additional analyses might be conducted.

Conditions

• Cigarette Smoking Behavior

Interventions

BEHAVIORAL

Control

In the control condition, participants will purchase tobacco/nicotine products in the ETM. Cigarettes will increase in price across trials.

BEHAVIORAL

Product Category Score

In the product category score condition, participants will purchase tobacco/nicotine products in the ETM where the percentage of taxes applied to each product category will be distributed between 0% and 100% proportional to their abuse liability score. Abuse liability scores will be scaled such that the product category with the highest abuse liability will be taxed at 100%.

BEHAVIORAL

Product Category Rank

In the product category rank condition, participants will purchase tobacco/nicotine products in the ETM where the tax percentage applied to each product category will be determined by the number of categories and their position in the ranking. The product category with the highest abuse liability will be taxed at 100%; the product with the lowest abuse liability will be taxed at 0%. All other tax rates will be equally spaced across other products based on ranking.

BEHAVIORAL

Product Tiers

In the product tiers condition, participants will purchase tobacco/nicotine products in the ETM where tobacco products will be placed in tax tiers to simplify the existing complex tobacco tax system. The investigators will use three tax tiers (i.e., high tax, medium tax, and no tax), as adopted by four states. Products will be placed into tiers depending on their average score (i.e. no tax: \< 0.33, medium tax: 0.33-0.66, and high tax: \>0.66). Products in the high tax tier will be taxed at 100% and products in the medium tax tier will be taxed at 50%.

Sponsors & Collaborators

• National Cancer Institute (NCI)

  collaborator NIH

• National Institutes of Health (NIH)

  collaborator NIH

• Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

  lead OTHER

Principal Investigators

• Roberta Freitas Lemos, Ph.D. · Fralin Biomedical Research Institute at VTC

Study Design

Allocation

NA

Purpose

OTHER

Masking

NONE

Model

SINGLE_GROUP

Eligibility

Min Age

21 Years

Sex

ALL

Healthy Volunteers

No

Timeline & Regulatory

Start

2026-07-31

Primary Completion

2027-03-31

Completion

2027-04-07

Countries

• United States

Study Locations