Benford’s Law and Number Selection in Fixed-Odds Numbers Game

In fixed-odds numbers games, the prizes and the odds of winning are known at the time of placement of the wager. Both players and operators are subject to the vagaries of luck in such games. Most game operators limit their liability exposure by imposing a sales limit on the bets received for each bet type, at the risk of losing the rejected bets to the underground operators. This raises a question—how should the game operator set the appropriate sales limit? We argue that the choice of the sales limit is intimately related to the ways players select numbers to bet on in the games. There are ample empirical evidences suggesting that players do not choose all numbers with equal probability, but have a tendency to bet on (small) numbers that are closely related to events around them (e.g., birth dates, addresses, etc.). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper to quantify this phenomenon and examine its relation to the classical Benford’s law. We use this connection to develop a choice model, and propose a method to set the appropriate sales limit in these games.     

Households’ precautionary behaviors—the effects of the introduction of National Health Insurance in Taiwan

By reducing risk of large out-of-pocket medical expenses, comprehensive social health insurance may reduce households’ motivation to engage in precautionary behaviors such as saving, procurement of private insurance, and spousal labor-force participation. We use the natural experiment provided by the 1995 introduction of National Health Insurance in Taiwan to examine these effects, using pre-existing differences in access to health insurance (tied to the household head’s and spouse’s joint employment status) to identify the effects of increasing insurance coverage. We find that comprehensive health insurance has a statistically significant and large effect on household savings, but no significant effects on purchase of private accident insurance and spousal employment.

Evaluating the Effectiveness and Efficiency of Hong Kong Welfare Programmes in Reducing Child Poverty

This paper examines the effectiveness and efficiency of welfare programmes that are relevant to child poverty reduction in Hong Kong. We employ data from a cross‐sectional survey of a representative sample of families, conducted in 2015 through face‐to‐face interviews. Our results indicate that all four welfare programmes were inadequate in alleviating child poverty. This was either due to the deep poverty gap to be filled or high rates of exclusion error. Most programmes are also inefficient because of inclusion error. We conclude by suggesting some policy implications for the welfare programmes.     

Combatting voter ignorance: a vertical model of epistocratic voting

In light of recent political events, prominent scholars have argued that voters ignorant of the issues should be disqualified from taking part in decisions that have the potential to alter political landscapes. As convincing as this literature is in highlighting voter ignorance, it fails to differentiate between local, state, and federal elections and how levels of political knowledge are often scale-dependent. If the level of median voter ignorance is not uniform from one level of government to the next, then neither can the reforms proposed to combat it. In this article, I adapt Bell’s vertical model of democratic meritocracy to argue that the larger the election, the more complex the issues, the more explicit the epistocratic safeguards needed.     

Poverty alleviation,coverage and fiscal sustainability: Investigating the effect of a new social pension in Hong Kong

This article synthesises the characteristics of social pensions across Asia and evaluates the effect of a new social pension in the Hong Kong SAR, the Old Age Living Allowance (OALA), on poverty alleviation, coverage rates and fiscal sustainability. We found that the effectiveness of the OALA in reducing old‐age poverty was limited, although it has led to an increase of retirement pension coverage by 6%. The OALA is projected to face substantial cost increases in the medium and longer term. Increasing the level of OALA benefits would be a direct means to enhance its poverty alleviation effect but may potentially be hampered by concerns about the fiscal sustainability of such changes. More obfuscated alternatives for Hong Kong policy makers to affect old‐age poverty alleviation include adjusting the indexing rules of benefit level payments and the eligibility criteria to reduce the stigma attached to the current policy choices.     

Utility Theory and Adolescent Drug Abusers in Hong Kong

Bauman (1980) showed that the perceived costs and benefits of drug abuse predicted adolescents' subsequent marijuana abuse. The purpose of this study was to replicate the Bauman study with Chinese adolescents in Hong Kong, adding further analysis of individual items of perceived costs and benefits of their drug usage. A total of 77 youth at risk (aged 12–21) were interviewed with a structured questionnaire and their attitudes toward drug abuse, stress level, coping strategies, and parents' marital status were obtained. Congruent with the utility theory, results indicated that the more positive their attitude toward drug abuse, the more likely their involvement in drugs and the higher the observed stages of abuse. However, there was no significant difference between the drug abusers and non-users in some antecedent variables including stress levels in most areas of the adolescent lives, in most stress coping strategies, and parents' marital status. Results are discussed in relation to prevention of adolescent drug abuse.     

A comparison of the size of families of roman catholics and non-catholics in Great Britain

Abstract In a recent study of family size ideals in the D.S.A. it was found that in the 1960'S the mean ideal family size of Catholics was about half a child higher than the mean ideal size of non-Catholics. This note describes an analysis of similar data for married women in Great Britain, derived from an investigation undertaken in 1966 for the Population Investigation Committee. A difference in ideal family size, which was of the same order as the American difference, was found; and, in addition, the actual fertility of Catholics was compared with that of others.     

The Network Autocorrelation Model using Two-mode Data: Affiliation Exposure and Potential Bias in the Autocorrelation Parameter

The network autocorrelation model has been a workhorse for modeling network influences on individual behavior. The standard network approaches to mapping social influence using network measures, however, are limited to specifying an influence weight matrix (W) based on a single mode network. Additionally, it has been demonstrated that the estimate of the autocorrelation parameter ρ of the network effect tends to be negatively biased as the density in W matrix increases. The current study introduces a two-mode version of the network autocorrelation model. We then conduct simulations to examine conditions under which bias might exist. We show that the estimate for the affiliation autocorrelation parameter (ρ) tends to be negatively biased as density increases, as in the one-mode case. Inclusion of the diagonal of W, the count of the number of events participated in, as one of the variables in the regression model helps to attenuate such bias, however. We discuss the implications of these results.