The Relationship between Socioeconomic Status and Lottery Rollover Effects in Toronto

Session Title

Poster Session

Presenters

Hin Ngai Fu, University of British ColumbiaFollow

Presentation Type

Poster Presentation

Location

Park MGM, Las Vegas, NV

Start Date

24-5-2023 10:30 AM

End Date

24-5-2023 11:15 AM

Disciplines

Cognitive Psychology

Abstract

Abstract:

In a lottery with a progressive jackpot, the rollover effect refers to the increase in revenue or engagement with the jackpot size. Using a geospatial dataset of lottery ticket sales aggregated by postcode, we test two corollaries of the rollover effect. First, is the rollover effect moderated by neighborhood socioeconomic status? Second, do fluctuations in progressive-lottery sales affect the consumption of fixed-prize lottery tickets in the same neighborhoods, in line with economic notions of ‘substitution’ versus ‘complementarity’? We used data from 2012-2015 from 3 progressive-prize lotteries in Toronto (Lotto 649, Lotto Max, and Lottario), Canada from 95 forward-sortation area codes. Our regression models controlled for other cyclical fluctuations including day of week, month of year, and common paydays. There was a significant interaction between jackpot size and neighborhood SES, such lottery sales in higher SES neighborhoods were more sensitive to jackpot size. For the analysis of substitution vs complementarity, we observed that sales of fixed-prize lotteries were positively related to sales of progressive-prize lotteries (e.g. for Lotto 649; ß = 0.068, p =

Implications:

The rollover effect provides a naturalistic insight into the effects of very large jackpots on gambling behaviour, and these analyses characterize two environmental influences in how such jackpots affect gambling engagement.

Keywords

Big data, Lottery, Gambling, Socioeconomic Status, Jackpot, Geospatial

Author Bios

Hin Ngai Fu is a Masters student in the Department of Psychology at the University of British Columbia. His research interests include using big data and machine learning techniques to investigate gambling behaviour.

Andrew Li is a graduate student in the Department of Psychology at the University of British Columbia. He uses psychological to design behavioral solutions to address financial and environmental sustainability issues.

Ross Otto is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at McGill University (Canada). His work relies on a combination of computational, behavioural, psychophysiological, and (more recently) ‘big data’ techniques to understand how people make decisions both in the laboratory and in the real world.

Dr. Luke Clark is a Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of British Columbia, and Director of the Centre for Gambling Research at UBC. He is an experimental psychologist by training. His research focuses on the psychological and neural basis of decision-making in gambling and its relevance to the development of gambling harms.

Funding Sources

The Centre for Gambling Research at UBC is supported by the Province of British Columbia government and the British Columbia Lottery Corporation (BCLC; a Canadian Crown Corporation). LC also holds a Discovery Award from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (RGPIN‐2017‐04069). HNF and AL holds a graduate fellowship from the UBC Department of Psychology. This research was also supported by a SSHRC Insight Grant awarded to Otto.

Competing Interests

LC is the Director of the Centre for Gambling Research at UBC, which is supported by funding from the Province of British Columbia and the British Columbia Lottery Corporation (BCLC), a Canadian Crown Corporation. The Province of BC government and the BCLC had no role in the preparation of this manuscript, and impose no constraints on publishing. LC holds a Discovery Award from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (Canada). LC has received a speaker/travel honorarium from the National Association for Gambling Studies (Australia) and the International Center for Responsible Gaming (US), and has received fees for academic services from the International Center for Responsible Gaming (US), GambleAware (UK) and Gambling Research Exchange Ontario (Canada). He has not received any further direct or indirect payments from the gambling industry or groups substantially funded by gambling. He has received royalties from Cambridge Cognition Ltd. relating to neurocognitive testing. HNF and AL have no disclosures.