Number 19: Another Victim of the COVID-19 Pandemic?

Patrick Roger, Catherine D’hondt, Daria Plotkina and Arvid Hoffmann
Additional contact information
Patrick Roger: UNiversity of New Caledonia - M.E.N.E.S.R. - Ministère de l'Education nationale, de l’Enseignement supérieur et de la Recherche, UNC - Université de la Nouvelle-Calédonie
Catherine D’hondt: UCL - Université Catholique de Louvain = Catholic University of Louvain
Daria Plotkina: EM Strasbourg - École de Management de Strasbourg = EM Strasbourg Business School
Arvid Hoffmann: University of Adelaide

Post-Print from HAL

Abstract: Conscious selection is the mental process by which lottery players select numbers nonrandomly. In this paper, we show that the number 19, which has been heard, read, seen, and googled countless times since March 2020, has become significantly less popular among Belgian lottery players after the World Health Organization named the disease caused by the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 "COVID-19". We argue that the reduced popularity of the number 19 is due to its negative association with the COVID-19 pandemic. Our study triangulates evidence from field data from the Belgian National Lottery and survey data from a nationally representative sample of 500 Belgian individuals. The field data indicate that the number 19 has been played significantly less frequently since March 2020. However, a potential limitation of the field data is that an unknown proportion of players selects numbers randomly through the "Quick Pick" computer system. The survey data do not suffer from this limitation and reinforce our previous findings by showing that priming an increase in the salience of COVID-19 prior to the players' selection of lottery numbers reduces their preference for the number 19. The effect of priming is concentrated amongst those with high superstitious beliefs, further supporting our explanation for the reduced popularity of the number 19 during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Keywords: Games of chance; lotteries; conscious selection; Covid19 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022-07-19
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Published in Journal of Gambling Studies, 2022, 39 (3), pp.1417-1450. ⟨10.1007/s10899-022-10145-3⟩

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
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: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:hal-04758262

DOI: 10.1007/s10899-022-10145-3

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Post-Print from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().