Introduction

Gambling is decision making under risk. On the surface, it seems a simple exercise, of gaining a profit or losing one's wager. While that is, of course, the essence of the exercise, a closer inspection reveals great complexity and scope. Indeed, this simplicity veiling a complex and general process is what has attracted academics from a variety of disciplines to consider gambling as a forum for investigating matters of wider importance than simply wagering. For instance, psychologists have used gambling to illustrate and inform about fundamental behavior in the face of uncertainty, and numerous behavioral biases have seen support. Economists bring a more rational, utility-based perspective to decision making under uncertainty, and wagering has provided an opportunity to test numerous theories and has generated new theories as well. Financial experts view gambling markets as possessing many of the intricacies of financial markets; however, the repeated and short-lived reduced form of gambling markets allows cleaner analysis than is generally possible in most financial markets. Thus, starker views of aggregate investor behavior are sometimes possible, including investigations of market efficiency. Statisticians have used gambling to motivate improved estimates of complicated probabilistic events. Mathematicians and management scientists have developed useful gambling strategies that have drawn on and extended efforts in other domains (e.g., Kelly betting and information transmission). While gambling is of academic interest in its own right, it has clearly been demonstrated to enhance our understanding of more farranging environments…