Legalized Gambling Activities: The Issues Involving Market Saturation

Nevada attracted many "tourists," including compulsive gamblers (.77-5% of the population), problem economic gamblers (10%), and others (42%). ... Interestingly, over 25% of the state lotteries were reporting declining revenues by early 1993, which would theoretically be expected not only from saturation of the lottery markets, but also from the partial migration of the gambling dollars to the harder forms of gambling. ... In similar economic scenarios involving concentrated legalized gambling activities, enormous quantities of the current tourist dollars and consumer dollars could be pulled away from the pre-existing economy and into the casinos, where those dollars would become part of the new gambling cycle. ... The pre-existing "softer" forms of legalized gambling, especially the horse tracks, the off-track betting parlors (OTBs), and the riverboat gambling interests, apparently did not want to compete with the "harder" forms of gambling represented by typical forms of land-based casino gambling, because it was understood that gambling dollars would tend to "migrate" from the softer to the harder forms of gambling.published or submitted for publicationis peer reviewe