An article on “Bet Doubling in Gambling and Investing,” written by Dr. Zaneta Chapman, Assistant Professor of Business Administration at Arcadia University, and Dr. Thomas Getzen, Emeritus Professor at Temple University’s Fox School of Business, was published in the Journal of Risk Finance in September 2011.

The paper analyzes strategies that gamblers and investors use to increase their chances of reaching certain monetary and/or survival goals while facing a losing proposition. Chapman and Getzen’s research examines how gamblers and investors use credit to increase their expected survival time and their likelihood of winning.

The model presented in the paper identifies the amount of credit that will make it possible for a gambler or investor to become a winner with an arbitrarily high degree of probability, even while facing a losing proposition. Although bet doubling is not new to the gambling literature, the paper considers the use of credit as a means of increasing survival time and expected net gain. Applications of the model are particularly useful to gamblers and investors when credit can be obtained at low costs.