Premium
The Presence of Odd Pricing in the Texas State Lottery 1
Author(s) -
Bartsch Robert A.,
Paton Vivian I.
Publication year - 1999
Publication title -
journal of applied social psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.822
H-Index - 111
eISSN - 1559-1816
pISSN - 0021-9029
DOI - 10.1111/j.1559-1816.1999.tb00117.x
Subject(s) - lottery , liberian dollar , state (computer science) , economics , advertising , demography , microeconomics , business , sociology , mathematics , finance , algorithm
We examined 443 drawings from the Texas state lottery from 1992 to 1997 to determine whether odd pricing effects would be found in multimillion‐dollar lotteries. Specifically, we predicted that many more lottery tickets than expected would be purchased when the jackpot amount was $10 million than when it was $9 million. Three findings emerged. First, the higher the jackpot, the more tickets were purchased. Second, odd pricing effects were found at $10 million such that approximately 670,000 more tickets were purchased than expected. Third, controlling for the jackpot amount, there were approximately 620,000 fewer tickets purchased for each drawing per year. This final finding provides evidence that people are becoming less interested in multimillion‐dollar lotteries.