Lotteries

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I am not entirely show where this goes, but since lotteries are technically a form of gaming, I'll put it here.
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I periodically buy lottery tickets if I feel lucky enough to do so; maybe once in a blue moon. I am not a compulsive gambler; I'm not stupid to do that crap. But I do get lucky at winning the lottery at times.. however, the prize is something really small, like $1 or $2. So in other words, I've won 'peanuts'.

Anybody like to play the lottery?

Irish Lottery as the odds are better.

£280 for three numbers, or £600 on the Lunch/Tea Time one.

I cannot ever play the lottery when it has record prizes anymore. I see it as a tax on the poor and those who cannot do math.

I play sometimes, but the most I have ever won was $5.00. My husband won $25.00 one time. I just don't like wasting money that way, even if there is a possibility that I could win.

I will NEVER in my life buy a lottery ticket. I read somewhere that there's more chance of finding one particular person in entire China and then guess what number between 1 and 100 they have in their mind. Also heard there's more chance of you dying on your way to buy a lottery ticket than to actually win it.

Anyways the lottery is here for a reason. That reason is profit so in my mind that means you're taken advantage of.

I usualy break even, tthough once I won $50.

Same could be said for casinos. Everybody knows that they are there to take your money, but they still do pretty well.

China has like 1.3 billion people, so that couldn't be true. The odds of winning the powerball jackpot are around 1 in 175-million I think.

Besides there's other lottery games here in the U.S. with a large cash prize that have much better odds than powerball. The "Win for Life" game is a good example.

I like the win 1k a week for life scratch off.

That's what "Win for Life" is except it isn't scratch off. What's the one you're talking about called?

It's fun cause the jackpot odds are only 1 in 1.3-million, are there's several lesser cash prizes too like 10k, 20k, and 50k.

www.flalottery.com/inet/scrathoff$Games ... umber=1136

See look this one has much better odds.

http://www.oregonlottery.org/GameInfo/WinForLife/

a. Playing the Lottery is a voluntary act.
b. Paying taxes is a mandatory act.

: : Lotteries and taxes are not the same thing.

However, I do look on state-run lotteries as a trap for fools and superstitious people -- the more money they spend on lottery tickets, the less they have to spend on drugs, guns, and worthless junk that can't even be sold on eBay any more.

Came up with this song many years ago:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPGKNL4WqAk[/youtube]

The site for the song idea was game-land.com, which has long since gone under.

Which is the typical statement you see from people that don't know much math (or in particular: game theory).

The point is that the utility-function (= how much you value it) of money is not linear. That means that for almost all people, for certain amounts of money the ratio between two different amounts of money and the ratio between how much someone would value these two amounts is not equal.

If I were to play a lottery for $1 every month, it would make no difference on my monthly budget, as $1 is spare change. This lottery may have a prize of $1,000,000 (although at very low chance). Winning such a prize would be a life-changing event. So winning $1,000,000 is more than 1,000,000 times as valuable to me as the completely insignificant $1 monthly payment.

I'm pretty sure that almost everyone actually knows that lotteries have a negative expectation value (though they may not use that exact terminology), but people still play because a relatively small investment gives them a chance of a lifestyle that they would otherwise not be able to obtain.

Species 5618

You are right that the value of money is often not linear. However this makes lotteries even less rational. The utility of a fixed amount of money for almost all people will decrease the more of it they already have (a possible exception would be someone who needs a certain amount of money to continue living or something similarly drastic, smaller amounts of money would have almost no value to them). Almost everyone would have less than 1,000,000 times the utility from $1,000,000 as they would with $1. People are poor judges of probability, especially with such large numbers.

It's possible whatever enjoyment they gain from playing makes up for this though.