What sort of stuff are they pulling? Like sending down a five dollar cocktail to keep someone spending 20 bucks a hand at the craps table?
I used to date someone whose father had a rather severe gambling addiction, and this is exactly what kept him coming back. When he talked about it, it was clear that what he was hooked on was the feeling of being a winner. Someone surprising you with a free drink and telling you it's because you're part of an exclusive club for winners gives some people that feeling even when they're objectively losing.
And that is the textbook definition confidence artistry: tricking people into thinking you're their special friend as a means to extract money from them.
But using programs like these just turn the most vulnerable into revenue for the state -creating wild conflicts of interest.
I don't know about sports betting, but I know that lottery players skew low income - making the state effectively tax low income households at a higher rate.
Reminds of the quote from Joshua the computer in War Games: "A strange game. The only winning move is not to play."
I am calling bullshit here. There's a popular narrative that we've somehow hacked the code of the human brain and can program people to do anything we want, against their will. Nonsense. The best you can do is move the needle a few percentage points across a statistically large number of humans. This is not something to worry about.
You mean, by starting a big casino, hiring thousands of people, advertising all over, etc.? A small investment like that?
> The best you can do is move the needle a few percentage points across a statistically large number of humans.
That may be true, but a "few percentage points" is enough to create enormous profits, if you do what I said above. Giving the house a 54% advantage instead of 51% makes a big, big difference.
Customer acquisition and retention is still hard. Especially when you're not the only gambling parlor in town. You're selling an addictive product which is extremely effective over a population but you don't have a moat to make sure they're addicted to specifically you.
But government and society don't care about a specific business, they're counting the number of people addicted by the industry in total.
And then your costs have to be less than that.
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/348346/coercion-by-...
However, they aren't wrong. They do in fact make about 50% more than he does just working part time on weekends.
I took a marketing class in the course of my CS degree, and my main takeaway was that a lot of marketers are aliens in people suits. Their ethics and priorities are utterly disconnected from anything human.
You really start to understand how e.g. IBM could knowingly and cheerfully supply the Nazis with the punchcard hardware they needed to keep the Holocaust running smoothly. The client's satisfaction is the only relevant criterion. "But they're killing millions of people" will be met with the same blank, uncomprehending stare as "But the paint you chose clashes with my sweater."
For my part, I was horrified. I couldn't find a way to see some of these tricks the use as anything but a form of highly evolved confidence artistry. Legal con artistry, sure. But a legal scam is still a scam. Even if the people getting scammed never wise to the scam, it's still a scam.
The arguments about tax revenues and suchlike don't make me feel any better about it. All I see in their success is a demonstration that a great many people will happily turn a blind eye to abusive behavior if they believe they can materially benefit from doing so. And, of course, they never do, anyway. The promises of professional con artists that our communities will benefit if we grant them imprimatur for their operations turned out to also be a scam. Con artists pulling a con; quelle surprise!