The purpose in this article is to demonstrate that buying more than one ticket in a lottery is readily explicable in models of utility that permit gambling at actuarially unfair odds. However, contrary to popular view, we show this choice cannot be explained in terms of a variance-skew trade-off.

Conditional on the Shin (Economic Journal, 103, 1993) model, the incidence of insider trading is estimated in two different British betting markets: those for horse-racing and the 1997 general election. Formal testing confirms that insider trading is significantly lower in handicap than...