19. Overview of Part III

In the chapters in this part of the book we have focused on some of the social cost issues related to casinos. In Chaps. 13 and 14, we present the economic perspective on social costs. Importantly, many social cost studies do not define what they mean by “social cost.” This has led to a wide variety of social cost estimates in the literature. Most of these likely overestimate the true social costs of gambling. Because of the inherent problems in defining and measuring social costs, it may be beneficial for researchers to stop trying to estimate a monetary value for costs, and instead identify the types of problems that disordered gamblers experience. Psychologists have been working on this issue for several decades.