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Contribution Details

Type Working Paper
Scope Discipline-based scholarship
Title Delay and Deservingness after Winning the Lottery
Organization Unit
Authors
  • Andrew J Oswald
  • Rainer Winkelmann
Language
  • English
Institution University of Zurich
Series Name Working paper series / Socioeconomic Institute
Number No. 815
Date 2008
Abstract Text Economics rests upon a set of presumptions about how human beings are affected by income. Yet causal evidence is scant. This paper reports a longitudinal study of randomly selected lottery winners. Remarkably, we show that it takes almost three years before they enjoy their money. We develop a model of dissonance and deservingness. We argue that, despite the tradition of economics, human beings may weight differently the different kinds of income that accrue to them. If so, it is not sufficient to describe utility by a function u(y), and it is not true that ‘a dollar is a dollar’.
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