Abstract The loot box, a feature of online video games, contains randomised virtual items importance to gameplay. Comparisons are drawn between chance-based boxes and the legal psychological definitions gambling, leading concerns that format may be an unregulated form quasi-gambling. Globally, several jurisdictions have intervened control some applying national gambling laws, while others imple...

This article aims to unsettle a pervasive cultural distinction between gambling – on one hand and the competitive games of society – on the other by exploring the role of whiteness as a form of symbolic capital in two different but closely related nations. Rather than following Pierre Bourdieu in relegating gambling to the constitutive outside of neo-liberal cultural and political economies, wh...

We describe a simple gambling game in which n participants each put down a xed amount of money and one of them, selected at random, wins and takes it all. We describe how this game can be operated in cyberspace, without knowing anything about the other participants except for the bit strings they transmit. We show how the genuine winner can convert the bit strings back into money, without any o...

A twoperson non-zero-sum bimatrix game (A, B) is defined to be completely mixed if every solution gives a positive probability to each pure strategy of each player. Such a game is defined to be nonsingular if both payoff matrices are nonsingular. Suppose that A is perturbed to A + aG and B is perturbed to B + aH, where C and H are matrices of the same size as A and B, and OL is a small real num...

A joint derivation of utility and value for two-person zero-sum games is obtained using a decision theoretic approach. Acts map states to consequences. The latter are lotteries over prizes, and the set of states is a product of two finite sets (m rows and n columns). Preferences over acts are complete, transitive, continuous, monotonic and certainty-independent (Gilboa and Schmeidler (1989», an...

In this work we address a game theoretic variant of the Subset Sum problem, in which two decision makers (agents/players) compete for the usage of a common resource represented by a knapsack capacity. Each agent owns a set of integer weighted items and wants to maximize the total weight of its own items included in the knapsack. The solution is built as follows: Each agent, in turn, selects one...

We consider the general problem of scheduling a set of jobs on a single machine where we may choose not to schedule certain jobs, potentially exceed machine’s capacity, and thereby incur a penalty for each rejected job. More specifically, we focus on choosing a set of jobs to reject and constructing a schedule for the remaining jobs so as to optimize two objective functions simultaneously: the ...

An inspection game is here a non-cooperative two-person-game between an inspector and an inspectee. It models a situation where the inspector controls the inspectee who has an incentive to violate certain legal obligations. A recent survey of inspection games applied to data verification, for example in nuclear material safeguards, is given in [1]. Dresher [2] described a sequential inspection ...

Background and aims Although alcohol intake and gambling often co-occur in related venues, there is conflicting evidence regarding the effects of alcohol expectancy and intake on gambling behavior. We therefore conducted an experimental investigation of the effects of alcohol expectancy and intake on slot machine gambling behavior. Methods Participants were 184 (females = 94) individuals [age r...