IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/cup/buetqu/v15y2005i01p23-35_00.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Does Lottery Advertising Exploit Disadvantaged and Vulnerable Markets?

Author

Listed:
  • Borg, Mary O.
  • Stranahan, Harriet A.

Abstract

Is it unethical to advertise lotteries? Many citizens think that states should not be actively promoting and encouraging the public to spend hard-earned dollars on a bet that they are virtually guaranteed to lose. Perhaps more importantly, business ethicists are concerned that lottery advertising may be targeting the most vulnerable markets: households with the lowest income and education levels. If this were true, then it would increase the already disproportionately large burden of lottery taxes on the poor. Fortunately, our research finds no evidence to support the contention that advertising is responsible for high rates of lottery participation and expenditures by lower income groups or that low-income groups are more affected by advertising than high-income groups. On the contrary, awareness of lottery advertising seems to be associated with a higher probability to play Lotto only for the middle income group. This means that lottery advertising may actually reduce the regressivity of lottery taxes.

Suggested Citation

  • Borg, Mary O. & Stranahan, Harriet A., 2005. "Does Lottery Advertising Exploit Disadvantaged and Vulnerable Markets?," Business Ethics Quarterly, Cambridge University Press, vol. 15(1), pages 23-35, January.
  • Handle: RePEc:cup:buetqu:v:15:y:2005:i:01:p:23-35_00
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/S1052150X00007338/type/journal_article
    File Function: link to article abstract page
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Ivan Bozhikin & Nikolay Dentchev, 2018. "Discovering a Wilderness of Regulatory Mechanisms for Corporate Social Responsibility: Literature Review," Economic Alternatives, University of National and World Economy, Sofia, Bulgaria, issue 2, pages 145-174, June.
    2. M. Hyman, 2009. "Responsible Ads: A Workable Ideal," Journal of Business Ethics, Springer, vol. 87(2), pages 199-210, June.
    3. Zhiming Cheng & Russell Smyth & Gong Sun, 2013. "Participation and Expenditure of Rural-Urban Migrants in the Illegal Lottery in China," Monash Economics Working Papers 24-13, Monash University, Department of Economics.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cup:buetqu:v:15:y:2005:i:01:p:23-35_00. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Kirk Stebbing (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.cambridge.org/beq .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.