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Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons

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Behavioral Economics

Singapore Management University

Research Collection School Of Economics

Lottery

Publication Year

Articles 1 - 3 of 3

Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Happy Lottery Winners And Lottery-Ticket Bias, Seonghoon Kim, Andrew J. Oswald Jun 2021

Happy Lottery Winners And Lottery-Ticket Bias, Seonghoon Kim, Andrew J. Oswald

Research Collection School Of Economics

The world spends a remarkable $250 billion a year on lottery tickets. Yet, perplexingly, it has proved difficult for social scientists to show that lottery windfalls actually make people happier. This is the famous and still unresolved paradox due initially to Brickman and colleagues. Here we describe an underlying weakness that has affected the research area, and explain the concept of lottery‐ticket bias (LT bias), which stems from unobservable lottery spending. We then collect new data—in the world’s most intense lottery‐playing nation, Singapore—on the amount that people spend on lottery tickets (n = 5626). We demonstrate that, once we correct …


Lottery Rather Than Waiting-Line Auction, Winston T. H. Koh, Zhenlin Yang, Lijing Zhu Oct 2006

Lottery Rather Than Waiting-Line Auction, Winston T. H. Koh, Zhenlin Yang, Lijing Zhu

Research Collection School Of Economics

This paper investigates the allocative efficiency of two non-price allocation mechanisms – the lottery (random allocation) and the waiting-line auction (queue system) – for the cases where consumers possess identical time costs (the homogeneous case), and where time costs are correlated with time valuations (the heterogeneous case). We show that the relative efficiency of the two mechanisms depends critically on a scarcity factor (measured by the ratio of the number of objects available for allocation over the number of participants) and on the shape of the distribution of valuations. We show that the lottery dominates the waiting-line auction for a …


The General Dominance Of Lottery Over Waiting-Line Auction, Winston T. H. Koh, Zhenlin Yang, Lijing Zhu Sep 2002

The General Dominance Of Lottery Over Waiting-Line Auction, Winston T. H. Koh, Zhenlin Yang, Lijing Zhu

Research Collection School Of Economics

This paper examines the allocative efficiency of two popular non-price allocation mechanisms — the lottery (random allocation) and the waiting-line auction (queue system) — for the cases where consumers possess identical time costs (the homogeneous case), and where time costs are correlated with time valuations (the heterogeneous case). We show that the relative efficiency of the two mechanisms depends critically on the scarcity factor (measured by the ratio of the number of objects available for allocation over the number of participants) and on the shape of the distribution of valuations. We obtain a set of analytical results showing that the …