Fear and loathing in Las Vegas: Evidence from blackjack tables

Bruce I. Carlin and David T. Robinson ()

Judgment and Decision Making, 2009, vol. 4, issue 5, pages 385-396

Abstract: This paper uses proprietary data from a blackjack table in Las Vegas to analyze how the expectation of regret affects peoples' decisions during gambles. Even among a group of people who choose to participate in a risk-taking activity, we find strong evidence of an economically significant omission bias: 80\% of the mistakes at the table are caused by playing too conservatively, resulting in substantial monetary losses. This behavior is equally prevalent among large-stakes gamblers and does not change in the face of more complicated strategic decisions.

Keywords: blackjack; gambling; omission bias; decision making. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009
View list of references

Downloads: (external link)
http://journal.sjdm.org/9519/jdm9519.pdf (application/pdf)
http://journal.sjdm.org/9519/jdm9519.html (text/html)

Related works:
Working Paper: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: Evidence from Blackjack Tables (2009)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:jdm:journl:v:4:y:2009:i:5:p:385-396

Access Statistics for this article

Judgment and Decision Making is edited by Jonathan Baron

More articles in Judgment and Decision Making from Society for Judgment and Decision Making
Series data maintained by Jonathan Baron ().