We exploit lottery wins to investigate the effects of exogenous changes to individuals' income on the utilization of health care services, and the choice between private and public health care in the United Kingdom. Our empirical strategy focuses on lottery winners in an individual fixed effects framework and hence the variation of winnings arises from within-individual differences in small ver...

Several medical schools include candidates' extracurricular activities in their selection procedure, with promising results regarding their predictive value for achievement during the clinical years of medical school. This study aims to reveal whether the better achievement in clinical training of students selected on the basis of their extracurricular activities could be explained by persisten...

BACKGROUND Effective demand creation strategies are needed to increase uptake of medical male circumcision and reduce new HIV infections in eastern and southern Africa. Building on insights from behavioral economics, we assessed whether providing compensation for opportunity costs of time or lottery-based rewards can increase male circumcision uptake in Kenya. METHODS Uncircumcised men aged 2...

OBJECTIVES We aimed to discover, through a controlled experiment, whether cognitive and non-cognitive assessment would select higher-achieving applicants to medical school than selection by lottery. METHODS We carried out a prospective cohort study to compare 389 medical students who had been admitted by selection and 938 students who had been admitted by weighted lottery, between 2001 and 20...

Two assumptions anchor most contemporary discussions of knowledge in cases of (large, fair, single-winner) lotteries. First, based on the long odds alone, you don’t know that your ticket lost. Second, based on watching a news report of the winning numbers, you do know that your ticket lost. Moreover, it is often treated as an uncontroversial datum that this is how most people view matters. Expl...

People migrate to improve their well-being, whether through an expansion of economic and social opportunities or a reduction in persecution. Yet a large literature suggests that migration can be a very stressful process, with potentially negative impacts on mental health reducing the net benefits of migration. However, to truly understand the effect of migration on mental health one must compar...

It is well known that incumbent politicians tend to receive more votes when economic conditions are good. In this paper we explore the source of this correlation, exploiting the exceptional evidence provided by the Spanish Christmas Lottery. This is a unique lottery: 75% of Spaniards play, sharing tickets, and every year at Christmas 0.3% of the Spanish GDP is at stake. Because winning tickets ...

The current research examines tacit coordination behavior in a lottery selection task. Two hundred participants in each of three experiments and 100 in a fourth choose to participate in one of two lotteries, where one lottery has a larger prize than the other. Independent of variations in the complexity of the mechanism of prize allocation, the prize amounts, and whether the lottery is the part...

We study two provisional fixed-prize mechanisms for funding public goods: an all-pay auction and a lottery. In our setting, the public good is provided only if the participants’ contributions are greater than the fixed-prize value; otherwise contributions are refunded. We prove that in this provisional fixed prize setting, lotteries can outperform all-pay auctions in terms of expected public go...

Sunspot equilibrium and lottery equilibrium are two stochastic solution concepts for nonstochastic economies. Recent work on nonconvex exchange economies has shown that when the randomizing device is a continuous random variable, applying the two concepts to the same fundamental economy yields the same set of equilibrium allocations. In the present paper, we examine economies based on a discret...