In gambling a Dutch book or lock is a set of odds and bets which guarantees a profit, no matter what the outcome of the gamble. It is associated with probabilities implied by the odds not being coherent.

In economics a Dutch book usually refers to a sequence of trades that would leave one party strictly worse off and another strictly better off. Typical assumptions in consumer choice theory rule out the possibility that anyone can be dutch-booked.

Gambling

One example is where a bookmaker has offered odds and attracted bets which makes the result irrelevant; in this case the implied probabilities will add up to a number greater than 1.

In this case, whichever horse wins, the bookmaker will pay out 200 (including returning the winning stake) and so make a profit of 10.

If for some reason Horse 4 was withdrawn and the bookmaker was foolish enough not to adjust the other odds, the implied probabilities would add up to 0.95 and a gambler could lock in a profit of 10, by betting 100, 50 and 40 on the remaining three horses respectively.

Other forms of Dutch books can exist when incoherent odds are offered on exotic bets such as forecasting the order in which horses will finish. With competitive fixed-odds gambling being offered electronically, gamblers can sometimes create a Dutch book by selecting the best odds from different bookmakers, in effect by undertaking an arbitrage operation. The bookmakers should react by adjusting the offered odds in the light of demand, so as to remove the potential profit.

In Bayesian probability, Frank Ramsey and Bruno de Finetti required personal degrees of belief to be coherent so that a Dutch book could not be made against them, whichever way bets were made; in other words their degrees of belief had to satisfy the axioms of probability.

Economics

In economics the classic example of a situation in which a consumer X can be dutch-booked is if he or she has intransitive preferences. Suppose that for this consumer, A is preferred to B, B is preferred to C, and C is preferred to A. Then suppose that someone else in the population, Y, has one of these goods. Without loss of generality suppose Y has good A. Then Y can first sell A to X for B+epsilon; then sell B to X for C+epsilon; then sell C to X for A+epsilon, where epsilon is some small amount of the numeraire. After this sequence of trades, X has given 3*epsilon to Y for nothing in return. Y will have exploited an arbitrage opportunity by taking advantage of X's intransitive preferences.

Economists usually argue that people with preferences like X's will have all their wealth taken from them in the market. If this is the case, we won't observe preferences with intransitivities or other features that allow people to be dutch-booked. However, if people are somewhat sophisticated about their intransitivities and/or if competition by arbitrageurs drives epsilon to zero, non-"standard" preferences may still be observable.