Lottery information; jackpot fixation

[mtbc]

For a specific lottery I can often find where they quote the odds of winning the different levels of prizes. However, I do not see a convenient cross-lottery database of these. Instead, as far as I can tell, people seem obsessed with the jackpots.

I hear of EuroMillions jackpots exceeding £100M and react by thinking that I do not want to play that lottery: even after the IRS take tax from it, £10M would make quite enough difference to me that if I were to play lotteries at all then I would much rather play one that instead paid out rather more £10M prizes but nothing much higher, probably also not so many £sub-10k prizes either: after all, I recently discovered that I have wholly forgotten about one week's holiday in North Carolina that I probably much enjoyed at the time. That is, I would want to maximize my chances of a personally meaningful win.

The odds information does seem to be out there and it would be trivial to write software such that one can supply a meaningful win range and it tells one which lottery to play. Does this exist and I am simply missing it? It feels so feasible.

Maybe there is a lack of demand for such a calculation. Perhaps the kind of people who do like lotteries much enjoy the excitement of thinking enormous wins remotely plausible or they enjoy occasionally winning trivial amounts or they focus on trying to pick winning numbers or something instead of on adjusting for nonlinear utility.

Comments

[damerell]

If you are the sort of person who thinks about the utility of different amounts of money you'll almost certainly notice that it decreases with the amount you have, so the £ you'd need for the ticket has higher utility than any of the £s you'd win, so it's an even worse deal than the odds make it appear. Hence such people don't typically play them at all, and hence which prizes they'd think are the least worst deals doesn't really matter.

[mtbc]

I'm not sure that it is: if society is increasingly rigged toward the property owners in the way that Marx and Corbyn might imagine then with enough capital one might manage a state change such that one is able to invest efficiently, pay lower effective tax rates, etc., and if living modestly never have to work again (which I'd highly value!), in a qualitatively different way that is not accessible in my normal lifespan if I simply accumulate the money I'm not spending on lottery tickets (which indeed I don't) and spend it on nicer food or pay it into my pension scheme or some other lawful thing or whatever.