The authors analyze consumer expenditure on the National Lottery in Spain, a popular game with over 100 draws per year and annual turnover of about three billion euros. Based on Tobit estimates using data from two nationally representative surveys, National Lottery players tend to be middle-aged married males with relatively low education. In contrast to previous research, the authors find a strong relationship between lottery expenditure and income, with estimated income elasticities of more than one. A parameter decomposition indicates that the effect of income on expenditure works through existing lottery players, not by attracting new players.

Lotteries operate today in many countries around the world. This type of gambling is usually run by governments and is sometimes described as regressive. Lottery is an unfair bet, so explaining the purchase of lottery tickets by risk‐averse consumers has been a challenge for economic theory. Lotteries can be analysed from either of two economic perspectives: as a source of public revenue or as a consumer commodity. In this paper the state of economic research on lotteries is reviewed, focusing on its main empirical findings.

This research is intended to assess the determinants of the television (TV) audience in Spain for professional cycling. Our data refer to cycling races broadcast on several Spanish TV channels and make it possible to compute three different audience variables: rating, share, and number of viewers. The most original contributions of this research are the new indicators of competitive balance for cycling races that are proposed here. The outcomes show that audience ratings depend mainly on the following features: competitive balance, the type of stage and race, the nationality of the race leader, and inertial behaviors on the part of viewers.

Currently, several proposed changes in sports betting laws are being debated in the United States and the European Union. This article examines the characteristics of sports bettors in three countries, Canada, Spain, and the United Kingdom, to determine who bets on sports in environments where this activity is both legal and popular. Unconditional and conditional analyses find that annual participation rates in sport betting are low, and that sport bettors tend to be young males with relatively high incomes. Sports bettors stand to gain the most from an expansion of legal sports betting opportunities, while the negative impacts of increased access to sports betting are expected to be minimal in the United States and difficult to assess in the European Union.

Lotto demand modeling typically focuses on a single game and evaluates whether estimated "effective price" (expected loss from buying one ticket) elasticity is consistent with net revenue maximization. However, a portfolio of several different lottery games is now usually offered to players and judging the effectiveness of agencies in generating revenue requires estimation of both cross-price and own-price elasticities. Here we employ data from Spain to derive elasticities. Results imply that games are under-priced if net revenue maximization is the goal. But the cross-price estimates suggest that the operator is successful in limiting the extent to which a large jackpot on one game cannibalizes same-week sales of other games. The paper also analyzes the impacts from two increases in the level of entry fees introduced during the data period. These appear to have affected net revenue favorably. (JEL D12, G11, H27, H30, L83)

A growing body of research examines the effect of loss aversion (LA) on consumers' decisions to watch or attend sporting events. Much of this research focuses on live game attendance. In contrast to the predictions of uncertainty of outcome hypothesis (UOH), loss-averse consumers prefer watching either potential upsets, or dominant performances by strong favorites, to events with uncertain outcomes. We test for LA vs. UOH effects in television viewing audience data for free over-the-air broadcasts of 304 Spanish football matches from 2008/09 to 2015/16. This setting generates substantial variation home team win probabilities because of the presence of Real Madrid CF and FC Barcelona. The results support the importance of LA/upset preferences: audience size for matches when home teams are large underdogs and when heavily favored are larger than for matches with uncertain outcomes, even when controlling for observable and unobservable factors affecting the number of viewers.

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