We find that lottery tax windfalls finance higher state-government expenditures on supplemental security income that increase consumption, but only during bust periods. Wealth transfers from lottery winners to low income households enable fiscal policy to stabilize consumption during bust periods. © 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Measuring the impact of government fiscal policy on cons...

This paper examines whether socio-economic and psychological factors which are known to influence lottery purchases lead to excess investment in lottery-type stocks. The results indicate that, unlike institutional investors, individual investors prefer stocks with lottery-type features. The demand for lottery-type stocks increases during bad economic times and such demand shifts influence the r...

We analyze the spending of individuals in the United States on lottery tickets in an average month, as reported in surveys. We view these surveys as sampling from an unknown distribution, and we use non-parametric methods to compare properties of this distribution for various demographic groups, as well as claims that some properties of this distribution are constant across surveys. We find tha...

The attractive huge prize causes people to adore lotteries. Due to the very small probability of winning prizes, the players can enhance their probability of winning by using the method of joint purchase. In spite of many lottery schemes having been proposed, most e-lottery schemes focus on the players' privacy or computation overhead rather than support a joint purchase protocol on the Interne...

We characterize revenue maximizing head starts for all-pay auctions and lottery contests with many heterogeneous players. We show that under optimal head starts all-pay auctions revenue-dominate lottery contests for any degree of heterogeneity among players. Moreover, all-pay auctions with optimal head starts induce higher revenue than any multiplicatively biased all-pay auction or lottery cont...

In this study we examine how the introduction of a reference lottery with nonrandom outcomes alters the way in which choices among pairs of lotteries are made, even if it does not alter the choices. We use different domains (some of the lotteries produce gains, other losses) and different contexts (one member of the pair, the reference lottery, may be either risky or certain). In our experiment...

We demonstrate that lottery players can be influenced to believe erroneously in the existence of “hot” numbers, where past winning numbers are perceived to have a greater probability of winning in future draws, even though past and the future events are independent. The existence of this “hot-hand” effect in lottery games is surprising, as works by Clotfelter and Cook (1993) and Terrell (1994) ...

Existing studies find that compared to non-lottery stocks, lottery-like stocks tend to be overpriced and earn lower subsequent returns, probably due to investor preferences for lottery-like assets. We argue that investor preferences for holding speculative assets are more pronounced ahead of firms’ earnings announcements, probably due to lower inventory costs and immediate payoffs. We show that...

We describe extensions to lottery scheduling, a proportional-share resource management algorithm, to provide the performance assurances present in traditional nonreal time process schedulers. Lottery scheduling enables flexible control over relative process execution rates with a ticket abstraction and provides load insulation among groups of processes using currencies. We first show that a str...

I first provide a complete characterization of the unique equilibrium of the lottery game by n lobbyists with asymmetric valuations, and then compare the lottery and the all-pay auction models of lobbying. I show that the exclusion principle discovered by Baye, Kovenock and de Vries (1993) for all-pay auction does not apply to lottery. I also show that the perverse effect that an exogenous cap ...