shinyJackpot: Visualizing lottery gambling in a large Canadian city

Lottery gambling is widely enjoyed by Canadians and is the most popular form of legal gambling. As such, discovering and analyzing patterns in lottery gambling data is an important but nontrivial task. In this work, three methods were presented to process and visualize it to the end user to allow for faster pattern discovery. A bubble graph was utilized for the comparative analysis of lottery sales per each neighbourhood of the city of Toronto, Canada. As well, a scatter plot was used to explore the relationship between different neighbourhoods, lottery game product, year, lottery ticket sales, and demographic information. Lastly, a line graph was deployed to compare the jackpot size and ticket sales over time. shinyJackpot is deployed at https://andrewcli.shinyapps.io/shinyJackpot/ for online use. The repository is available at https://github.com/andr3wli/shinyapps.

jackpot rollover and lottery regressivity

have found the lottery to be a regressive form of taxation that varies by game and whose regressivity declines at higher jackpot size. This paper conducts an in-depth analysis of the effect of consumer spending on lottery regressivity during the Mega Millions rollover sequence and reports the following findings. First, regressivity among six games examined in the paper varies by game and is inversely related to the prize/jackpot size of the game. Second, an increase in the jackpot size reduces the regressivity for the Mega Millions game, but not for the other five games. Third, the impact of household income distribution on lottery sales varies by game, and in the case of Mega Millions, by jackpot size as well. We did not find a significant difference in the demand for the Mega Millions game between below middle-income households and high-income households. However, the demand by middle and upper-middle income households is significantly higher than the demand by high-income households, especially at a higher jackpot size. Lastly, as the jackpot size grows over $100 million and higher, a large cash inflow from states with no Mega Millions flows into the New Jersey lottery market. The majority of the additional cash inflow is spent on the Mega Millions game and there does not appear to be a significant spillover to other New Jersey lottery games.

Gambling at Lucky Stores: Empirical Evidence from State Lottery Sales

We show that the week after selling a large-prize Texas Lotto winning ticket, a retailer experiences a 12 to 38 percent relative increase in ticket sales. Some increase persists for up to 40 weeks. We document that the sales response increases with jackpot size and is larger in areas with more economically disadvantaged populations. Sales patterns across games and across retailers are not consistent with most advertising explanations. Furthermore, response patterns are not consistent with representativeness-based explanations for the hot hand or gambler's fallacy; we suggest an alternative explanation for the observed "lucky store" effect. (JEL H27, H71)