People are disappointed if the team they root for or the candidate they support loses. Could you dispel your disappointment if you bet on your team or candidate to lose? That is, would your financial gain offset your emotional loss?
Previewing a paper forthcoming in the journal Management Science, this op-ed piece in The New York Times’ Sunday Review describes a set of experiments designed to answer that question. The overall finding: test subjects didn’t like the bet itself; winning would feel disloyal.
One test with NCAA basketball fans eliminated the downside and offered a nothing-to-lose wager: “If your team loses, I’ll give you $5.” 46% said, “No thanks.” To clarify, another test with NCAA hockey fans altered the bet: “If your team loses, I’ll give $5 to Doctors without Borders.” Only 5% turned that down.
What creeps people out is not hard to explain. People do not want to act purposefully (bet) such that they would profit personally (win) from a harm (loss) that befalls those they care about.* Duh. Humans are not homo economicus. Whew!
Fortunately, you can’t be disloyal at Koodbee because you can’t personally profit. So, you can put aside what you want to occur, bet on what you think will occur, maybe prove how smart you are and, whatever your results, help make the crowd’s odds and probabilities just by playing.
Good luck at the Election games.
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* The life insurance business offers this “bet” and had a hard time, early on, overcoming the ethical qualms among others. See Viviana A. Zelizer, Morals and Markets: The Development of Life Insurance in the United States, New York: Columbia University Press, 1979.
