Pathological gambling involves one prominent exemplar of impaired decision-making that reflects the psychological addiction of the disorder; namely, the tendency to continue gambling to recover previous losses. This behavior is known as “loss-chasing” (Lesieur, 1984). Loss-chasing is observed in both recreational gamblers (Dickerson et al., 1987) and in pathological gamblers (American Psychiatric Association, 2000). Descriptive theories of choice under uncertainty attribute this behavior to the fact that losses fall on the convex part of a psychophysical function relating monetary value to its subjective value, such that the decrease in utility associated with gambling and incurring further losses is proportionately smaller than the reduction in utility associated with sustaining the losses already incurred (Khaneman and Tversky, 2000). Presumably, the neural (and neurochemical) systems involved in resolving such dilemmas contribute to the loss-chasing observed in both recreational and pathological gamblers.
