The Economics of Lotteries: An Evidence from Vietnam

Abstract

This study aims at investigating the behaviors and characteristics of the lottery players and the lottery sellers in the Vietnam's lottery market. Data were collected from two primary surveys in 2010 and 2016. Descriptive statistics and quantitative methods including multivariable regression model and logit model are used to analyze the data by the support from R's statistical software. The findings from the study indicate that Vietnamese people have spent approximately $3.7 billion on purchasing lottery tickets in 2016. This study also has explored that the average earnings of the lottery sellers is 5.2 million VND per month, which is higher than the GDP per capita in Vietnam in the same year, however they have to face many challenges with their working conditions. Especially, this research has built the logit model to estimate the probability of the lottery participation. In addition, it is evident that income has a weakly positive effect on buying lottery tickets. Moreover, the factors including age, peer-play, educational attainment, and behavior toward risk also contribute to explain the behavior of buying lottery in Vietnam. A strong recommendation is that since the Vietnamese relative purchasing of the lotteries power is 1.86 times higher than that of the worldwide average level, therefore, the Vietnamese state authorities should not encourage their citizens to participate more into the lottery market and spend more on lottery tickets.