TY - JOUR

T1 - Better Knowledge Need Not Affect Behavior

T2 - A Randomized Evaluation of the Demand for Lottery Tickets in Rural Thailand

AU - Zenker, Juliane

AU - Wagener, Andreas

AU - Vollmer, Sebastian

N1 - Funding Information: Juliane Zenker is a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Goettingen, Germany; her e-mail address is jzenker@uni-goettingen.de. Andreas Wagener (corresponding author) is professor of economics at the University of Hannover, Germany; his e-mail address is wagener@wipol.uni-hannover.de. Sebastian Vollmer is professor of development economics at the University of Goettingen; his e-mail address is svollmer@uni-goettingen.de. The research for this article was funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) in its Research and Training Group 1723: “Globalization and Development” (DFG RTG 1723). The authors wish to thank Marcela Ibanez and Juanita Vasquez-Escallon as well as seminar participants at the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies for valuable comments and suggestions, and Antonia Grohmann, Lukas Menkhoff, Sahra Sakha and Hermann Waibel for their support. Two referees and the editor, Andrew Foster, provided many helpful suggestions. A supplemental appendix to this article is available at https://academic.oup.com/wber.

PY - 2018/10

Y1 - 2018/10

N2 - Many households in developing countries spend substantial amounts on lottery tickets but have only poor knowledge about the properties of the game and hold upwardly biased beliefs on the prospects of winning. To test whether more accurate knowledge reduces lottery participation, households in rural Thailand were informed, in a randomized intervention, on the actual probability distribution of the Thai Government Lottery. This indeed led to a better knowledge about the Thai Government Lottery in the treatment group. However, the improved knowledge did not (substantially) affect the willingness to pay for lottery tickets.

AB - Many households in developing countries spend substantial amounts on lottery tickets but have only poor knowledge about the properties of the game and hold upwardly biased beliefs on the prospects of winning. To test whether more accurate knowledge reduces lottery participation, households in rural Thailand were informed, in a randomized intervention, on the actual probability distribution of the Thai Government Lottery. This indeed led to a better knowledge about the Thai Government Lottery in the treatment group. However, the improved knowledge did not (substantially) affect the willingness to pay for lottery tickets.

KW - Field experiment

KW - Information intervention

KW - Lottery

KW - Thailand

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85058111081&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1093/wber/lhw060

DO - 10.1093/wber/lhw060

M3 - Article

AN - SCOPUS:85058111081

VL - 32

SP - 570

EP - 583

JO - World Bank Economic Review

JF - World Bank Economic Review

SN - 0258-6770

IS - 3

ER -