Vorschau |
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Abstract
Online and offline gaming has become a multi-billion dollar industry. However, games of chance are prohibited or tightly regulated in many jurisdictions. Thus, the question whether a game predominantly depends on skill or chance has important legal and regulatory implications. In this paper, we suggest a new empirical criterion for distinguishing games of skill from games of chance: All players are ranked according to a "best-fit" Elo algorithm. The wider the distribution of player ratings are in a game, the more important is the role of skill. Most importantly, we provide a new benchmark ("50%-chess") that allows to decide whether games predominantly (more than 50%) depend on chance, as this criterion is often used by courts. We apply the method to large datasets of various two-player games (e.g. chess, poker, backgammon, tetris). Our findings indicate that most popular online games, including poker, are below the threshold of 50% skill and thus depend pre- dominantly on chance. In fact, poker contains about as much skill as chess when 3 out of 4 chess games are replaced by a coin flip.
Dokumententyp: | Arbeitspapier |
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Name der Reihe: | Discussion Paper Series |
Band: | 0643 |
Ort der Veröffentlichung: | Heidelberg |
Erstellungsdatum: | 22 Dez. 2017 12:26 |
Erscheinungsjahr: | 20 Dezember 2017 |
Institute/Einrichtungen: | Fakultät für Wirtschafts- und Sozialwissenschaften > Alfred-Weber Institut |
DDC-Sachgruppe: | 330 Wirtschaft |
Schriftenreihe: | Discussion Paper Series / University of Heidelberg, Department of Economics |