Why Consumers Buy Lottery Tickets When the Sun Goes Down on Them. The Depleting Nature of Weather-Induced Bad Moods.

We propose that weather conditions can influence consumers’ engagement in lottery play. A longitudinal study on the extent of lottery play in Belgium shows that lottery expenditures are indeed higher after reduced exposure to sunshine, even after controlling for people’s inertia, time-varying characteristics of the game, and deterministic seasonal components. The results of a first laboratory study are consistent with these findings, and establish a link between lottery play and negative mood. Subsequent experiments provide evidence that depletion due to active mood regulation attempts, rather than mood repair, is the underlying process for the link between bad weather and lottery play

Verbal aptitude hurts children's economic decision-making accuracy

The impact of children's decision making increases with age and has relatively increased through time. Although a lot is known about cognitive development, less is known about how this development impacts decision accuracy in economic situations. This study builds on revealed preference theory to study the impact of cognitive aptitude on economic decision-making accuracy and explores the intervening role of decision heuristics. In a study (n = 100) where children from three age groups had to make choices between combinations of products, we found that decision accuracy was lower for kindergarteners than for children from the third and sixth grade, replicating and validating older findings. We found that one aspect of cognitive aptitude, namely, verbal aptitude, hurts rather than helps decision accuracy. Further explorations suggested that this relation was due to the decreased use of the “more is better” heuristic, a child's preference for options with many units, which decreased with increasing verbal aptitude but increased rational decision making. We discuss the implications of the negative effect of verbal aptitude on economic decision-making accuracy.SCOPUS: ar.jinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishe