For over forty years, tort reform proponents have disparaged the tort system as a lottery, arguing that it produces arbitrary outcomes. This criticism has been offered as justification for reform proposals that would replace the tort system with some form of no-fault accident insurance. We do not oppose no-fault alternatives to tort, but this Essay is not the place to weigh the merits of one or...

The continued expansion of the casino industry has caused increasing concern regarding the cannibalization of other industries (e.g., state lotteries), an issue of particular importance to policymakers since casinos and lotteries can make a significant impact on state budgets. Although previous papers have found that casinos and lotteries act as substitutes, no previous research has analyzed th...

The study is an analysis of the character Tessie Hutchinson in American writer Shirley Jackson’s short story The Lottery. The duality in Tessie’s character represents the psychological conditions of all the participants in the lottery; while at the same time, having unfortunately won the lottery, Mrs. Hutchingson serves in the story as a victim, a scapegoat of the brutal primitive ceremony. In ...

In 1987 the State of Wisconsin, in authorizing a state lottery, required the Wisconsin Lottery Board to contract with IRP to undertake a study of the impact of the lottery on Wisconsin residents of various income levels. Titled "Who Plays the Lottery? A Comparison of Patterns in Wisconsin and the Nation," the study was carried out by Irving Piliavin and Michael Polakowski and is available as IR...

This paper finds the state lottery tax to be vertically inequitable. The tax is inherently regressive, meaning poorer income classes spend a larger share of their income on lottery products than higher income classes. The paper also finds the lottery tax to be horizontally inequitable. Older people, males, less educated individuals, and minorities (except Asians) all tend to spend more on lotte...

People are reluctant to exchange lottery tickets, a result that previous investigators have attributed to anticipated regret. The authors suggest that people's subjective likelihood judgments also make them disinclined to switch. Four studies examined likelihood judgments with respect to exchanged and retained lottery tickets and found that (a) exchanged tickets are judged more likely to win a ...

BACKGROUND Poor adherence to medications is a major cause of morbidity and inadequate drug effectiveness. Efforts to improve adherence have typically been either ineffective or too complex to implement in clinical practice. Lottery-based incentive interventions could be a scalable approach to improving adherence. METHODS This was a randomized, controlled clinical trial of a daily lottery-base...

Motivated by efficiency and equity concerns, public resource managers have increasingly utilized hybrid allocation mechanisms that combine features of commonly used price (e.g., auction) and non-price (e.g., lottery) mechanisms. This study serves as an initial investigation of these hybrid mechanisms, exploring theoretically and experimentally how the opportunity to obtain a homogeneous good in...

A longitudinal experiment examined the influence of a lottery of gift certificates on response and retention in a four-wave study conducted in an online panel. Independent of the lottery, people who responded in a given wave were more likely to respond in the next wave. This process was characterized to follow a first-order Markov chain. There was a direct positive effect of the lottery on resp...