Local Opt-Out Provisions in a State Gambling Expansion: An Analysis of Pennsylvania Municipalities

A 2017 gambling expansion bill in Pennsylvania included a provision that gave municipalities the option to ban a new casino from opening within their borders. This paper examined how different factors influenced local decisions on whether to allow casino gambling. Multilevel linear probability models indicated that municipalities were influenced by economic characteristics, as evidenced by a higher likelihood of allowing casinos in communities with lower levels of household income. Results also suggested that municipalities were influenced by variables related to tax competition and the percentage of residents who were black. The findings of this study identify factors that may influence municipal governments when given the authority to opt out of a state gambling expansion capable of generating a new source of local tax revenue.

‘Spatio-market practices’: conceptualising the always spatial dimensions of market making practices

Socio-material conceptualisations of markets suggest that they are spatial formations. Yet, the everyday practical and spatial dimensions of market making have received little explicit attention. We thus introduce the concept of spatio-market practices, drawing on key ideas in market studies and spatial theory. We argue that examining spatio-market practices (and thus the spatial dimensions of markets) promises to provide fresh insight regarding what it takes to realise markets, their uneven distribution, and what and whom markets are (and are not) designed to serve. To demonstrate what the concept calls for, supports and promises, we take Humphreys’ (2010) influential paper as a starting point and draw on other secondary sources in order to articulate an alternative and spatially-oriented account of the growth and legitimacy of the American casino gambling market. This paper, in turn, contributes a subtle and yet incisive shift in thinking, which supports a more explicit means of exploring markets as spatial formations.

Ambiguity and Abjection: Residents’ Reactions to a New Urban Casino

While the social and economic costs and benefits of new gambling locations have been studied extensively, less is known about how new venues are experienced in view of city residents’ spatial and sociocultural identities. This study examines residents’ opinions and expectations on a new small-scale casino in the City of Tampere, Finland, as a case of new gambling opportunities in an urban setting. Nine focus group interviews were conducted with 43 Tampere residents three years prior to the scheduled casino opening. The study points out ways in which the residents struggled conceptually with the casino project. When speaking about it, participants drew on an imagery of popular culture, drawing a sharp line between casino gambling and the everyday convenience gambling so omnipresent in Finnish society. As residents of a historical industrial urban region, the participants positioned themselves as critical towards the municipality’s aims to brand the venue in a larger experience economy entity. By drawing on the concepts of city image and city identity, the study is able to demonstrate that the cultural geographical intrusion of new physical gambling spaces can appear as harmful to the city character. In the studied case, this is likely to hamper the City of Tampere’s chances to prevail on the very same experience market, of which the new casino is part.

Slot Machine RTP Optimization Using Variable Neighborhood Search

This work presents a Variable Neighborhood Search (VNS) approach for solving the Return-To-Player (RTP) optimization problem. A large number of software companies in the gaming industry seek to solve the RTP optimization problem in order to develop modern virtual casino gambling machines. These slot machines have a number of reels (e.g., three or more) that spin once a button is pushed. Each slot machine is required to have an RTP in a particular range according to the legislation of each country. By using a VNS framework that guides two local search operators, we show how to control the distribution of the symbols in the reels in order to achieve the desired RTP. In this study, optimization refers only to base game, the core of slot machine games, and not in bonus games, since a bonus game is triggered once two, three, or more specific symbols occur in the gaming monitor. Although other researchers have tried to solve the RTP problem in the past, this is the first time that a VNS methodology is proposed for this problem in the literature with good computational results.

Spinning is winning: Social casino apps and the platformization of gamble-play

Social casino apps are an emergent genre in the app economy that sits at the intersection of three different industries: casino gambling, freemium mobile games, and social media platforms. This institutional position has implications for the social casino app’s political economy and culture of consumption. We argue that social casino apps are representative of a broader casualization of risk that has taken hold in a platform society. By combining the uncertainty and chance associated with gambling with the interruptibility, informality, and modularity of free-to-play mobile games, social casino apps offer complete contingency in how they are designed and played. Game progression and social networking features are used to normalize the relationship between the consumer of social casino apps and the contingency of their desired form of play. As a result, the experience of risk is no longer restricted to the casino floor and in fact becomes a part of one’s daily routine. This casualization of risk marks the next adaptation of the contingent cultural commodity, where nothing is guaranteed and everything is subject to chance.