In 2020, gamers spent more than $15 billion on loot boxes, lotteries of virtual items in video games. Loot boxes are contentious. Regulators argue they constitute gambling, while game producers maintain they complement gameplay. In a prototypical mobile puzzle game we show that gameplay...

We examine the impact of stock market wealth and business cycles on gambling. Rising stock market wealth is expected to increase expenditures on entertainment goods, including gambling. Conversely, rising volatility is expected to draw betting outlays to the stock markets. Gambling is also...

This paper links Native American racial self-identification with the rise in tribal gaming across the United States. We find that state policy changes allowing tribes to open casinos are associated with an increase in the probability that individuals with American Indian ancestors will...

During the COVID-19 pandemic, many new individual investors globally entered the stock markets, often pursuing speculative investment strategies that resemble gambling. A concern is that trading as a form of gambling can become addictive for some people, as documented by several recent studies...

Little is known about how gamblers estimate probabilities from multiple information sources. This paper reports on a preregistered study that administered an incentivized Bayesian choice task to n=465 participants (self-reported gamblers and non-gamblers). Our data failed to support our main...

This paper analyses the impact of current and past lottery wins on household labor supply in the United Kingdom using data from the British Household Panel Survey 1997-2008. Estimating individual fixed-effects models, we show that male annual hours of work do not respond to lottery wins, whilst...

We describe how the presence of insiders with superior information about potential outcomes of sporting events affects odds set by bookmakers, using a generalized version of the model in Shin (1991). The model has been widely cited as an explanation for the pattern of favorite-longshot bias...

We provide new evidence of a favorite long-shot bias for bets placed on baseball games. Our analysis uses the difference of mean run differentials as an observable proxy for the probability of a team to win. When baseball is viewed through this proxy, we see that bettors believe favorites are...