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Since emerging in Fiji in 1964, betting on Australian horseracing has become an increasingly common pastime for Fijian men. A recently introduced urban practice, this type of gambling is associated with 'modern' social settings and is ideologically situated outside the traditional Fijian paradigm. It faces widespread condemnation as an economic pursuit, with cash circulated through the betting shops often being labelled bad money. Paradoxically, this negative valuation of gambling also appears to be one of the most alluring aspects of it. As a public arena, the betting shops provide a social space in which Fijian men interact on the basis of overt egalitarianism, disorder, and rowdiness, principles and behavioural patterns largely discouraged within the traditional boundaries of the village. Gambling is subversive because money generated from these pursuits is unsuitable for the village economy and thus becomes available to spend freely on luxury goods, namely alcohol, tobacco, or take-away food, all of which are otherwise largely inaccessible. Gambling on horse racing is consequently gaining increasing social importance for Fijian men who wish to negate the constraints of traditional village life and partake in social and economic activities governed by personal desires and consumption rather than traditional communalism. While commercial betting in Melanesia has largely been ignored by anthropologists, this paper proposes that it is a salient point of study for understanding the complex social dynamics that emerge at the interface of gendered and ethnic identities and tradition and modernity in Fiji. Keywords: Fiji, gambling, ethnographic theory, modernity, money., Ward H. Goodenough (1970:104) has pointed out that the key pursuits of most anthropologists --to describe peoples culture and the way they think about their everyday lives--is in itself much [...]

We study UK horse racing for signs of conflict between horse owners (principals) and trainers (agents). Trainers often prepare their own horses for races in addition to having outsiders' horses in their care. Utilizing betting market data to infer the expected performance of a horse, we find that owner-trainer horses outperform outsider-trainer horses, indicating that this principal-agent relationship is characterized by agent shirking. If the owner holds a large proportion of the horses in the trainer's stable, the shirking effect may be mitigated but not eradicated. In a separate result, we find that outsider-trainer horses are more inconsistent than their owner-trainer peers. As inconsistency is a sign of betting market manipulation, this suggests that the agent in this setting extracts a second, informational rent from the principal. JEL Classification: D82, J32, M52, G14, 1. Introduction We employ agents to undertake a number of frequent tasks on our behalf. Agents are entrusted to find us a job, manage our investments, and school our children. [...]

A sports lottery in Korea presents a unique opportunity for comparing a parimutuel-type sports lottery market against a bookmaker market outside the realm of horse racing. Using two- and three-game soccer final-score betting in the sports lottery market in Korea, which features matches in the English Premier League, we compare winning payoffs in this parimutuel-type sports lottery against corresponding payoffs from an established bookmaker market in the United Kingdom. We find that for outcomes with relatively high payouts (that is, lower-probability events), winning bets placed in the sports lottery market have greater payoffs than corresponding bets placed in the bookmaker-based market. However, the opposite is true for outcomes with relatively low payouts (that is, higher-probability events). Results suggest that participants in the sports lottery market tend to bet more toward high-probability events than the amount implied by the bookmaker's odds. Results also suggest that the favorite-longshot bias is still present in the bookmaker market, even when there is less threat of privately informed bettors than in horse racing. JEL Classification: G14, L83, 1. Introduction Market mechanisms under which sports betting takes place can be categorized into two major types: a bookmaker system and a parimutuel market system. In a bookmaker-based system, the [...]

The impact of incentives of prize money in Arabian horse racing is examined.

A model based on paramutuel system has been used to analyze the irregularity of equilibrium and revenue-taking in horce race gambling. It was shown that under a system where a raceholder's revenue is not large, there exists an equilibra wherein the chances of winning is greater is greater than otherwise.

Sportswriter Pete Axthelm's interest in the subculture of bars and horse racing may have lead to his early death in 1991, but he was able to make an impact on coverage of professional football and other sports, as well as horse racing. Axthelm was not interested in making a living at the track, but he appreciated and understood the qualities that would make a horse excel. While just a few years out of Yale, he became a successful sportswriter in the New York tradition, but he remained most interested in the life surrounding the track.

We formulate the problem of growth optimal investment in horse race markets with proportional costs and study growth optimal strategies both for stochastic horse races as well as races where one does not make any distributional assumptions. Our results extend all known results for frictionless horse race markets to their natural analog in markets with costs. Index Terms--Growth optimality, proportional transaction costs, universal investment.