Lottery information; jackpot fixation
Sep. 16th, 2017 08:27 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mtbcFor 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
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.
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 winrange 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.
no subject
Date: 2017-09-20 02:56 pm (UTC)(But I'm still not buying lottery tickets.)